Plastic surgery regret
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.
Jennifer Grey, enough said.
She’s not young, but I’ve seen recent photos of Jane Fonda in which she looks plastic rather than alive. I’ll take the relatively few wrinkles I have over an artificially frozen face.
She Got A Nose Job – MAD Twists Rock N’ Roll (The Dellwoods)
Regrets about plastic surgery reminds me about regrets about sex change surgery.
Rod Serling saw this coming in 1959 with “The Twilight Zone” episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_12_Looks_Just_Like_You
The heroine wants to refuse “the transformation”, which causes all sorts of problems for her. She is told her father underwent “the transformation” and ended up looking as “a very handsome man”, i.e. like every other man in the episode. She retorts that her father killed himself because “when they took his identity away, he had no reason to go on living!”
Neo, your first case looks like an emaciated, starved old woman. Maybe a candidate for a PEG feeding tube, but not cosmetic surgery!
Whenever I see something like this can’t help but think of Rachel Green’s nose job on Friends. The makeup people were great. It was amazing how Aniston’s beauty changed so dramatically with that change in nose shape.
Cicero:
In her “after” you can see the top of her torso, which looks completely normal to me and not emaciated. She does have a somewhat narrow face shape, but that can be the case at a normal weight.
Diana Muldaur in an interview said she’d considered cosmetic surgery than said to her self, “Naah, someone in this business has to look this age”.
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Joan Rivers looked absurd for much of her life in the public eye. Whoever has been working on Carol Burnett is more careful and subtle. Eva Marie Saint I’m going to guess has never let a plastic surgeon near her. Nancy Olson, Dick van Dyke, Hal Linden, and William Shatner I’m going to guess found someone careful and subtle like CB’s surgeon.
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Absolute disaster: Kim Novak.
The toughest training programs for applicants seeking admission are, in descending order,
1) Plastic surgery (which requires a prior full general surgery residency of 4-5 years, or at least used to)
2) Dermatology
3) Radiation oncology
Why? Because in these specialties one is rarely called out nights and weekends. As opposed to general surgery, where one is called out at 3AM to take a ruptured spleen out of a raging drunk, no insurance, who just totalled his car. And cosmetic plastic surgery is not insured; cash only, please!
Radiation oncology used to be the absolute bottom rank of specialty training programs. MDs mostly abhor math and physics, but the advent of computers changed all that!
My MD son-in-law did a triple major: math, physics, and computer science. He now runs the digital medicine program at a very major medical center.
Here’s June Taylor. She was 82 at the time of these interviews.
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https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/june-taylor
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Here’s Jane Wyman at age 79
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK5ajnNtLo0
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Cannot quite tell if they’ve been worked on or not. (Both sets of interviews are engaging). For some reason, Jane Wyman favored ugly glasses and clothes.
I went to college with Margie Thomas, Danny’s daughter. Knew her pretty well. After she graduated and had nose job, she became Marlo Thomas and had a good career. A lot of my friends, Catholic boys all, had Jewish girlfriends in high school. We went through the nose jobs and the black eyes with them. Their parents were not happy with us but, I guess, we were forbidden fruit for them.
Lisa Dejardanes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Desjardins
has had a recent nose job. I waited for years for her to make the decision to do this and it seems she has. There is also a story out there about an “eye patch”. Search the internet and you will see some “botchy”info. But, in the beginning she had a very large “Danny Thomas” style nose! Now, what you see is the “after surgery” look and it is a big improvement!
My wife has a Roman nose, just like her father. I feel it is a flattering feature of her beautiful face and whenever she broaches the subject of altering it, I tell her she is crazy. So far she has relented.
The dancers seem to age better than other performers – I guess all that hoofing keeps you in shape.
There was one girl in my synagogue youth group who had inherited a Dick Tracy hawk/hatchet nose. I don’t know if her parents made her wait until after high school on purpose, or if it was precipitated by the start of matchmaking dates in college – but one summer when we were in college she showed up with new nose that made her very happy. I don’t think it made her more confident as she always was so.
The rabbinical attitude to plastic surgery has changed as the procedures – and surgery in general – have become less dangerous. Initially it was considered a frivolity not worth the risk to life.
These procedures have made inroads in the Orthodox Jewish community as well – some of our friends have had peeling, lid lifts, and other treatments before their kid’s weddings “to look good for the pictures”. I can think of only two who seem to have had full lifts, and the changes are still “age-appropriate” which is perhaps the key to good results.
As they become more standardized and safer, they will become more common. Just like laser eye surgery.
My first husband’s mother was fond of a self-help book that was popular in the 1970s: Psycho-cybernetics. IIRC, the author was a cosmetic surgeon who noticed positive changes in his patients’ self-image after surgery even when, in his observation, the results weren’t all that different from the “before” face. He concluded that his patients’ BELIEF that they looked younger, prettier, etc. was more important than the surgery itself.
The whole book is based on the idea that changing your self-perception will help you achieve more than changing your physical appearance will. Don’t know if there’s anything to it, but MiL was a big fan.
Sort of like a Granny Smith?
Although from the childhood and young adult photos, some need no improvement. The apple of Gerard’s eye.
she became Marlo Thomas and had a good career.
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She was the principal in a vaguely amusing sitcom which was on the air for five years. About 60% of her film and television appearances as an actress to date consist of episodes of that one series, which went off the air in 1971. She does have a long history of appearances as a personality on talk shows and the like – about four a year over 70 years. She did some work as a producer during the period running from 1967 to 2004, about one production every other year.
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The idiot commentary about That Girl is oh-what-a-trailblazer she was blah blah because the principal in the story was a woman without plans to marry and on her own blah blah. Except of course that the fictional character was living way beyond her means without any reference to the financial subsidy which must have been arriving each month from her father and bf.
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MT married a divorcé with five children when she was 42 and he was 45. She never had any children of her own and his children were late adolescent and up when they married, so she hardly functioned as a custodian of any of them. (She once said they already had a mother and that was not a role she could fill).
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We had a neighbor and friend whose father was recruited and hired by a Manhattan law firm in 1980. The family moved down to New York in stages over the next couple of years. After one trip to New York, his daughter tells my sister that she’s walking down the street in Manhattan and who does she see but Marlo Thomas. They were going the same direction so she ended up observing her over several blocks. She said it was the damnedest thing; MT would go up to a street vendor, swipe a piece of his inventory, and then a factotum following behind her would arrive and pay for it.
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At one time, she and her husband employed an abnormal number of domestics (a butler, a laundress &c). I assume they had to sign nondisclosure agreements on engagement. One who did not (or defied his) generated an as-told-to memoir of his years in their employ. By his account, her husband was agreeable and professional; she was a nightmare. I suppose you wouldn’t assign much weight to the accounts of a disgruntled employee, but this is a woman who hired a man to settle up with street vendors.
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/garrulous complaint off.
Seen in a local grocery store.
The older man looked healthy, tanned, athletic and very successful in his career. Dressed in expensive clothes and shoes, wearing a sweater. Obviously from a warmer region and coping with our cooler yet still short sleeved weather.
Around the corner emerged his wife. A ghastly vision, suitable for a Halloween mask. Her waxy translucent skin was stretched too tightly to her skull with no flesh appearing underneath. Frail, fragile, almost anorexic.
My instant impression was made at that point. He was a wealthy and successful plastic surgeon from southern California. She wanted to remain young, beautiful, and attractive. The first surgeries didn’t deliver the promises and led to many more in a futile attempt to recover the losses.
I remain convinced of the accuracy of this assessment.
I hope to age gracefully and accept whatever ravages, time gives me
A lot of ENT docs got into “facial plastic surgery” as it boomed in California, with the expected results. I saw a few really bad results. I think one guy in Newport Beach went to prison. Can’t recall the details.
I find it interesting that you posted this so shortly after a post in which you mention that Kamala Harris is younger and looks better than Trump.
Harris has obviously had “work” done. Part of why she looks youthful is because she’s had a face lift to remove wrinkles from her forehead an cheeks.
Look at her neck and hands. They’re dead giveaways of someone who’s facial skin is artificially tightened. Those elements show the age even after a face lift.
I do not understand some people’s obsession with trying to keep looking youthful in their dotage. They ultimately inevitably come to look terrible over time because it is so obviously unnatural. Nancy Pelosi is a prime example. From a male perspective, Mickey Rourke is the one that comes immediately to mind.
In my humble opinion, ageing gracefully doesn’t necessarily mean looking young for your age, it means accepting that looking older and more mature is attractive in its own way.
Those artificial efforts to keep looking “beautiful” ultimately lead to the exact opposite in the long run…and sometimes in the short run too.
Jennifer Grey had a promising acting career, and a nose with a great deal of character. After Dirty Dancing, she apparently believed her appearance would limit her prospects, and had a nose job, and then another to correct problems with the first one. It did affect her career, but not in a good way.
it means accepting that looking older and more mature is attractive in its own way.
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It may not be. You can still keep your weight in check, keep what’s left of your hair properly trimmed (including facial hair) take care of your teeth, and dress in a dignified manner. Unless you’ve been in an auto accident, been burned, or have some grisly blemish or growth, best to let it be.
https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/diana-muldaur
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Diana Muldaur was 72 at the time of this interview.
“They look in the mirror and don’t recognize the person they’re seeing.“
Heck, I do that every morning…for free!
…And then there are the disgruntled patients who REALLY don’t like what they see…and shoot their doctor…
(Sorta gives one a new perspective on malpractice insurance…)
Betty White aged very well. Though she was almost unrecognizable at the time of her death at 99. I think it might be something about being in your 90’s as the same thing happened with my mother.
Barry Meislin-I try not to look in mirrors, my first thought is who is this old man? I have come to believe that what Harrison Ford said, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage” is true. With a vengeance.
Author John D. Macdonald referred several times to a person’s face having a “lived-in look”. Probably the best result.
Sailorcurt:
I disagree on Kamala. When I was her age, I was very often taken for someone several decades younger. I am dark also, and dark people are a lot more likely to age more slowly. Kamala and I are not that different in skin color. Also, I recently happened across a YouTube video in which a cosmetic surgeon discussed her, using photos from every few years. His conclusion was that she had NOT had work done.
Women typically want to look attractive to men, but they are often unwilling to learn what men find attractive. HINT: it is not some theoretical notion of perfection. Jennifer Grey is an extreme example of this. For heaven’s sake: she was an international sex symbol before she aimed for “perfection”. The nose job girl in the video is another example.
Ah, I used to love Harrison Ford…but then he just had to open his mouth….
(Oh well, still had some great films…)
Are there any YouTube videos by surgeons who can remove an apple from a person’s face?
After force awakening one realized he was immune to humiliation dial of destiny confirmed it even the great john rhys davis couldnt save it all it was missing was bill nighy for pure cheeseball
The cgi didnt really help much in this regard
Women typically want to look attractive to men, but they are often unwilling to learn what men find attractive.
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They’re competing with each other and don’t give a rip what men think. About anything.
Watched DIrty Dancing a couple of times. Did not notice The Nose. In retrospect, could see no reason to try to “Improve” things.
“Also, I recently happened across a YouTube video in which a cosmetic surgeon discussed her, using photos from every few years. His conclusion was that she had NOT had work done.”
OK. I have no evidence or expertise to back up my assertion, just age and experience, which is always is subject to biases and mistakes, so I’ll defer to your position.
Doesn’t change my opinion of her either way…I have no moral judgement about people who’ve had plastic surgery, I just don’t understand the motivation for someone who’s not trying to fix an abnormality or injury and I continue to believe that in the long run, in many cases if not most, it ends up doing more harm than good.
One of my nieces was born with a cleft lip. She had to have several surgeries done over the years. Her last one took place about the same time Michael Jackson was having so many done. She said “I can’t understand people who have this done just out of vanity”
I echo a few of the preceeding comments to the effect that, barring extreme disfigurement or functional impairment, one’s best course is to abstain from cosmetic surgery. Although the topic is facial surgery, it seems there are many procedures involving other parts of the anatomy, some kind of obvious (boob jobs) and others more… arcane (“Brazilian butt lift” anyone?). I suspect that many, perhaps most of those whose appearance is otherwise unremarkable and who undergo cosmetic surgery are victims of the spiritual disease that afflicts people who recognize no higher authority than themselves. Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Bible clearly tells us, pretty much from the outset that we are God’s special creation, made in His image. If you don’t recognize that, then why not cut and paste your visage–and other parts of your anatomy–to your personal satisfaction? Same goes with all those who tatoo their epidermis until they look like a circus sideshow freak or who pierce their flesh with every sort of device until they look as if they fell headlong into a fishing tackle box. But hey, that’s just me.
Then again, what the body can do to recover under the guidance of skilled plastic surgery is pretty amazing. Fix a dime sized area where a skin cancer was removed to barely notice it at all, up to the most amazing I ever heard about, a full face removal and replacement. Or if it was not a full face replacement, then they cut the face across the top of the skull and folded the face and muscle, etc. down to gain access to repair nasal bone structure or something.
@KyPerson: “One of my nieces was born with a cleft lip. She had to have several surgeries done over the years.” I had not realized it might take several surgeries to make that correction. The solicitations you get for doctors to visit Africa, etc., to repair the cleft palettes and lips shown on the kids in the photos imply “just send up $35 and we can fix this kid up in no time almost as good as “in God’s image”.
A family friend of ours was a plastic surgeon, and his wife was a psychiatrist. The two of them wrote a book together about the psychology of cosmetic surgery, to provide guidelines for doctors trying to figure out if their patients were good candidates or not. Apparently quite a few people get it for the wrong reason and then are very unhappy. This was years ago…
“I suspect that many, perhaps most of those whose appearance is otherwise unremarkable and who undergo cosmetic surgery are victims of the spiritual disease that afflicts people who recognize no higher authority than themselves.”
Agreed. Same issue with many “transgendered” people. They are unhappy with who they are so they attempt to “fix” themselves by making cosmetic changes. Unfortunately, no matter how extreme the changes on the outside, they’re still the same person on the inside and are, therefore, still unhappy.
It’s the same basic thing as trying to run away from your problems by relocating. “No matter how far I go to get away from my troubles, there I am.”
There’s only one thing that can fill that God shaped hole in your heart, and a nose job ain’t it.