You know how it is with YouTube. You look at one video on a certain subject, and after that – at least for a while – the algorithm floods you with similar videos, tempting you to watch. So I must have looked at a video about cosmetic surgery, and since then I’ve watched quite a few.

I find them fascinating. There are basically two kinds. Few people my age are featured, but there is a batch of youngsters – teens or early twenties – mostly having nose jobs, and a batch of what in the cosmetic surgery world passes for old (that is, forties and fifties and maybe just turning sixty) having face lifts.

For the most part, I tend to think they look better in their “befores,” especially the youngsters. And even the older face lift group has the disadvantage of having purposely harsh lighting and no makeup “before,” as well as lines drawn by the surgeon on their faces to highlight and seem to deepen whatever lines already exist. Even then, the “after” photos sometimes look good but sometimes look odd to me, as though their faces have been washed of all character.

The nose job group tends to feature a pretty young woman with a nose that is not at all grotesque or disfiguring, at least in my mind. It’s usually a nose that I think she would probably grow into and would seem distinguished and “interesting” as she gets a bit older, but she’ll never get the chance because she ends up with a retrousse-type nose that turns up at the tip and is quite narrow. Their faces often end up looking unbalanced and doll-like to me.

Here’s an example of the facelift sort, with the “before” featuring bad lighting, no makeup, and extra lines drawn, compared to the “after” with great lighting and tons of makeup, as well as smiles. I can get results like that in videos without a face lift, just by manipulating those things. I’m not saying the face lift did nothing for this woman. I just think she was probably quite attractive before if she’d had the right lighting and makeup, and in the “after” she looks artificial and a bit frozen and overly made up:

Here’s another face lift example, this time without the lines drawn. This is a much younger woman, and she looks great in the first photo even without makeup and with the harsh lighting.

Here’s an example of a nose job video in a young woman. I chose this one because it was the first short video that came up when I did a search at YouTube for “nose job” rather than because it has any special characteristics. It’s rather typical but some of the videos are even more extreme in the relative attractiveness of the “before” nose and what I consider the too-diminutive and slightly-unnatural look of the “after.” Then again, she seems very happy with the results:

There is also a whole genre of nose job and/or face lift disaster videos where something has gone wrong and a second or third or fourth surgery is required. These are sad, but fortunately the majority of cosmetic surgeries don’t end up this way.

But the stories that most fascinate me are ones where the person is unhappy with the results for different reasons. Usually, the person has gotten exactly what she (it’s usually a “she,” although quite a few men get cosmetic surgery too) wants. But there’s an unease, sometimes a dramatic one. The feeling is one of unexpected loss of identity: she doesn’t recognize her own face anymore.

The face is extremely central to our idea of ourselves. That’s why so many young women who are insecure find fault with features that are basically fine, although not like a model’s. But after having those features “fixed,” many young women (I don’t know what percentage) experience regret that can be quite intense even though their surgeries were successful in the objective sense.

They look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person they’re seeing. This can happen to many people at the beginning but they adjust quite nicely in a few days or weeks. But for some the feeling persists and persists. I’ve even seen videos where young women ask to have a little bump put back on their noses, or ask to have the tip turn down again. Revision surgery can be done but it’s riskier and usually requires grafts of cartilage from ear or rib.