on faces
I was reading an article about how people are now getting chin implants (men and women). This is the sort of article I ought not to read, because it makes me vain. Along with my tiny nose and no-tweeze eyebrows, I also have a chin that could most charitably be described as "pugnacious." This now makes three major features of mine that other people pay money for. Apparently the rest of the world would like to look Irish, because really, I look very much like other people of my gene pool--certainly the rest of my family appears to have been stamped out by cookie-cutter.
The notion of facial surgery--and I should specify that I'm talking about voluntary stuff here, not reconstructive--came up yesterday. My friend S and I were talking about how different movie stars look their age (or not). We're kind of feeling like all the ones who are our age look older than we do, so the concern was, Do we look older than we think we do?
Both of us decided there are two factors we can't tell the effect of, but which are factors that don't apply to our faces. First, movie stars have all kinds of stressors on their faces, from a lifetime of heavy makeup and chemicals, to the requirement of staying so thin it borders on haggard. Whatever else one can say about weight, it does a good job of keeping the face smooth for a few extra years.
Second is the effect of bad plastic surgery. When a forty-year-old gets a face lift, but it looks as if she got a face lift, this automatically ages her (or him, increasingly). We still associate the "lifted" look with sixty-year-olds, even though the age of facial surgery has been trending downward.
Or it could just be that I'm getting older and can't really tell. I look in the mirror and to me it's still the same face that's in my high school yearbook.