Tag: Facelifts

Cause and effect

…Here’s what happened.  Having caught sight of myself, backlit, in the bathroom mirror, I realised that I had started to develop a fine pair of mutton-chop sideburns (or sideboards as my dad used to call them) and a serious beard trim was called for.  In mitigation, I must point out that I was tired and struggling with new contact lenses that appear to make everything crystal clear except for when I want to see it, but anyway, undaunted I set the beard trimmer and started the trim.  What I didn’t do was replace the comb/guard, meaning that what I actually achieved was a very neat and precise shaved pathway through my beard and across my startled face.  My choices then were limited: either brazen out the look – claim to be preparing for a major role in a new sci-fi series or recovering from major surgery – or shave the rest of my face.

I chose the latter and I am now faced with a curious spud-faced lunatic staring back from the bathroom mirror.  “Who are you?  You have my smile, you have my nose, but you don’t look like me.”  Do I look older, or younger, I can’t decide?  I look like my dad before he started to look like me.  It is very disconcerting.  All I have done is to trim a bit of facial foliage.  Imagine if I’d had a facelift: reduced the nose (50% would be good) removed the bags from under my eyes, raised the cheekbones, de-wrinkled the forehead… how would I feel about myself then?  My face has always had ‘character’ – eg, looks like it might have been stuck in front of me when I upset Mike Tyson – and asymmetry is interesting isn’t it?  This mug tells the history of my life – which is probably why I chose to cover it in hair.  Nobody wants to read that book.

So, I start to wonder: if I look different, do I automatically feel different?  Do I behave differently?  Michael Jackson famously used his own face as some kind of plastecine experiment and his increasingly bizarre appearance was matched by increasingly eccentric behaviour, but which was cause and which effect?  Was he moulding his face to match his disposition, or did his distorted features find reflection in his state of mind?  Did he feel anything like as grotesque as he ended up looking?  If so, what is that likely to mean for me and my newly discovered blubbery boat race.  Will I become a (more) neurotic mess, constantly in fear of being cornered by Dan Ackroyd and his Proton Blaster?  Will my mind take on the character of the bowl of mashed potato my face has become?  Will my soul – much like my arteries – be filled with butter?

Hopefully I will never know: my beard grows quickly enough for my appearance to revert to type before my psyche changes and, anyway, I will wear my glasses the next time I trim it – if they still fit my big, fat head…

Upon (Another’s) Reflection

Come on, everyone looks weird in a selfie don’t they?

I caught a photograph of somebody (I can’t tell you who – it was Courtney Cox) on the internet looking absolutely nothing like herself and I started to wonder if people have mirrors any more.  We’ve all seen (if you haven’t, they’re very easy to find) any number of pictures across the internet of people made unrecognizable by plastic surgery and are left with the question ‘Why?’  Mostly these were very beautiful or handsome people, presumably desperate not to age, who spent many, many thousands of pounds in making themselves look much, much worse than they originally did.  Who ever looked better after repeated surgeries?  OK, you have a crooked nose – so have it straightened, and then STOP.  Most Hollywood stars now look simply weird.  Who convinces them that they will look better with skin stretched like Clingfilm?  Who fails to tell them that in a few years time, the Clingfilm will look like it has been under a hairdryer?  Generally speaking, the stars that age the best are those who just age.

There are many photographs of formerly normal looking people who, following costly cosmetic procedures, look barely human.  If they look better now than they did pre-tuck and fill, I would honestly encourage them to sue their parents.  It is like a gambling addict chasing the losses.  The worse these people look, the more they seek to correct it.  The more they seek to correct it, the worse they look.  Anyone of my age in the UK will remember the scene from the series Spooks when Helen Flynn had her face pushed into a deep fat fryer.  (It was one of those TV moments that had you eating the cushions.)  Imagine paying thousands of pounds to achieve the same results.  How unfriendly must their mirrors be?

I toyed with accompanying my three blogs this week with this recent photograph of me, taken last week at a wedding, for this one reason, simply to prove the veracity of what I have to say: no oil painting, but not quite milk-curdling*.  In the end I used it just today as I felt it unfair to put anyone off three meals in a week.  If you had my face looking back from your mirror, you would not be ecstatic, but you would probably learn to live with it – even if it meant racking up the multiples of ‘seven years bad luck’ as you patrolled the house with a hammer.  There are many things I would be happy to change about me – most prominently my personality, but I don’t think such a procedure exists, except in politics – I wish I had a slimmer, shorter nose, less porcine eyes, teeth that look less like stalactital remains.  My forehead, I fear, has moved beyond the bounds of Botox correction and would, instead, probably require complete replastering.  But would I actually do it?  Would I want to look in the mirror and see somebody who patently isn’t me – even if they did look much better – or would I just start seeing other things that were wrong with my appearance: the bags under my eyes, the scars on my brow, my many many chins and would they bother me even more alongside my otherwise improved visage?

Frankly, I think I’ll just live with what I’ve got.  I feel lucky that I have not had to pay hard cash to end up looking this botched-up.  I’ve had plenty of time to get used to how I look; it doesn’t really bother anybody else and it does help to keep the cats out of the garden.  Besides, if I had any Friends, I’d want them to still be able to recognise me…

*I only just noticed, seconds before publishing, that I had originally typed ‘milf curdling’, which is almost certainly grounds for divorce, if not actually illegal…