The violence of facelifts Cosmetic surgery conceals our true selves

Every now and again, I find I can’t visually process human faces into integrated wholes. It’s the first sign of an ocular migraine arriving, before the jagged, pulsating lightshow that signals its presence unambiguously.

My eyes anxiously scan the fleshy shapes that lurk beneath hairlines. My gaze does not know where to settle. I look in the mirror and see my own features fragmented, a bit like a late Picasso — but more so, because a portrait is still grasped as a single unit of meaning, while the uncanny object in front of me no longer shows that much coherence. Though it’s easy to forget when things look normal, I’m reminded of the importance of a familiar face for a sense of personhood: crucial to the self as even a well-known hand, foot, or elbow could never be.

I recalled this experience as I read a news story on Monday about a man called Dave Evans, who was radically disfigured by an awful cycling accident four years ago. With half his natural face obliterated by burns and subsequent surgery, doctors have now given Evans an astonishingly life-like silicone prosthetic, restoring a visual impression of symmetry and wholeness. The initial mold was generated by 3D scanning and printing, after which technicians put in the crucial finishing touches by hand: painting the iris, carefully adding eyebrow bristles, reproducing the color and texture of Evan’s skin “down to the inclusion of freckles, veins, and wrinkles”. Though this work involved high artificiality and advanced technique, it paid suitably reverent tribute to the uniqueness of his natural face.

This story stands out partly because it is at odds with much of the culture elsewhere. Published on the very same day, for instance, was a Guardian piece describing — with only the mildest trace of disapproval — how women in their twenties and thirties are increasingly turning to interventions such as the “deep plane facelift” to restructure their features into generic facsimiles. Subcutaneous muscle is moved and trimmed away; facial ligaments are cut. “People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” a plastic surgeon told the reporter. Yet he didn’t comment on a more metaphysically puzzling question: how, given the close intertwining of face and self, can a radically new face count as a “version” of the old self at all?

The question may sound abstract, but you only have to look at Kris Jenner to see its point. The 69-year old Kardashian matriarch recently unveiled what is thought to be the result of a deep plane facelift. She too has said that it represents “the best version” of herself, yet it’s hard to detect much continuity with the past. From some camera angles, perhaps, she looks youthful, but still nothing like the young woman she was in the 1970s. At best, it is as if she is now playing one of her own daughters in a David Lynch film.

While cosmetic surgeons treat living flesh as if it were plasticine, the online world also exhorts you to transcend your natural features: use filters, create an avatar, tune your face like it was an off-key song. But even among tech bros, there are occasional signs of recognition that something else might be at stake. At Meta, they are working hard on “Codec avatars”: life-like virtual images for communication at a distance, based on prior meticulous scanning of your physical face and body. In 2019, the company’s Director of Research said they were aiming for a feeling of “social presence”, for which there were two informal tests: the “ego test” and the “mother test”. “You have to love your avatar and your mother has to love your avatar before the two of you feel comfortable interacting like you would in real life”. Unspoken but implicit was the thought that most mothers don’t want to interact with a Facetuned version of their offspring. Ideally, they want the beautifully imperfect real thing.

As ever, bad philosophy is partly to blame for present cultural mistakes. In the late 20th century, postmodern philosophers played their part, undermining the conceptual boundary between the natural and the artificial. Some were also keen to dismiss the idea of a stable “self” at all. Every facial expression counted as a ghostly mask or performance, no matter how authentic or sincere, reducing any pressure to prioritize the original. But probably a greater influence has been the pernicious idea of the mind (or self, or soul) as something real but hidden; whose presence cannot be seen directly, but is only indirectly inferred through bodily behavior, speech, and facial expression.

The arch-dualist Descartes, treating body and soul as separate substances, seemed to think of the human face as just another part of the corporeal front-of-house, with the soul floating vaguely backstage. “I considered myself as having a face, hands, arms, and all that system of members composed on bones and flesh as seen in a corpse which I designated by the name of body” he wrote in the Meditations. But I like Wittgenstein’s story better: when I interact with a fellow human being, my attitude towards him “is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul”.

That is: treating other people as ensouled is constitutive of human interaction, built into the basic terms of engagement. There is not, first, the act of seeing some movements, and only then an intellectual inference to hidden pains or joys. The pain or joys are seen directly in the other person’s face and body. I smile meaningfully at you, and you smile meaningfully back. I literally see your mind in your smile, as you do in mine. Or as Wittgenstein also put it: “the human body is the best picture of the human soul”.

To some, this may sound suspiciously like the reviled “pseudoscience” of physiognomy: the theory, particularly fashionable in the deracinated, stranger-filled 18th and 19th centuries, that reliable associations can be made between moral character and appearance traits like forehead size and nose shape. Without this, the novels of Charles Dickens would have been a lot less colorful. Traditionally, progressives have hated the very idea of physiognomy, worried about the social injustices that would arise if the general public believed in it; but this hasn’t deterred modern social psychologists from suggesting the core idea might be true. Recent experiments suggest that people can sometimes — though obviously not infallibly — identify things like political orientation, sexual orientation, levels of honesty, intelligence, and even violent tendencies based on facial appearances alone.

Meanwhile, AI facial recognition technologies can also apparently pick out gay males from straight ones, and liberals from conservatives, at even more impressive rates, suggesting that there exist genuine associations to be noticed by suitably perceptive humans. Once again, then, we seem to have a case of ordinary people being talked out of old commonsensical knowledge by the supposedly better educated.

But whereas physiognomy involves making predictions about general character traits, to say you can literally see someone’s mind or soul in their body and face is to make a different point – one about human uniqueness. It’s a gestalt: the alchemic interplay of features, gestures, facial movements, vocal tones, speech patterns, and other habits of mind that add up to an irreplaceable, particular person in the beholding of them. That this is the norm for meaningful human interaction is what makes even skillful impersonation of people you know so weird and hilarious: almost there, but not quite.

Perhaps this all sounds a bit too mystical to take seriously. Perhaps human faces are just bits of flesh performing functional tasks, as Descartes implied. But if you think otherwise – as I do – then it starts to look psychopathic that we culturally approve of faces being sliced up and rearranged into stiffly impersonal, generic masks, for no other reason than the owner’s vanity. At the very least, when the surgeon discards all those bits of muscle and skin, he is also cutting off others’ capacity to know you properly. At worst, he is doing some violence to your deepest self. When you look in the mirror, the eyes, nose, and mouth may all be in roughly the right places; but even you may not be able to tell who is looking back.

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