I want that face

This article is published in number 41 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 12 October 2021

In the movie Time di Kim Ki-duk, in 2006, a woman undergoes a series of cosmetic surgery operations to completely change her face, seduce her boyfriend and thus prove to herself that he could also fall in love with someone else. She succeeds and this throws her into a spiral of self-destruction. Those were the years when Lacey Wildd, an American TV personality, operated on every part of her body to become “an extreme Barbie”, with her daughter complaining on TV that her life “revolved around mom’s boobs.”

Much has changed since then: if in 2006 the reflection on cosmetic surgery could still be philosophical (we wondered where we ended up, our authentic face, and where the “other” began, the search for otherness), in 2021 we are forced to outline a more pragmatic discourse, which takes into consideration the massive amount of annual cosmetic surgery operations (1,088,704 only in Italy, which is the fourth country in the world for aesthetic interventions, according to the estimates of the International Society for Aestethic Plastic Surgery) and tries to establish an ethical limit between the lucid intervention on one’s own physicality and that moved by pathological reasons. The urgency of this new approach stems from the latest, crazy trend among the very young (ie Gen Z, but also a little bit millennials): the “rich girl face», remaking one’s face in the image and likeness of the most desired and wealthy Internet idols. Treatments range from preventative botulinum to procedures with science fiction names such as Unison e Ultra Woman 360 and aim to create caricatured, hypertrophic copies of stars of the moment like Kim Kardashian e Ivanka Trump. The model most sought after by patients is – according to David Hartman, American plastic surgeon – Kylie Jenner. But let’s go to the details, since the “rich girl face»Is a patchwork of features stolen from different stars: the most requested noses have long been those of Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman e Nicole Kidman, and for men that of Jude Law. For the eyes, Anne Hathaway and Mila Kunis. For the lips we have in mind again Scarlett Johansson e Angelina Jolie. The rear – because the «rich girl face» does not neglect to look for a rich B side – is naturally inspired by J.Lo.

In general, the request is opposite to that classically associated with plastic surgery, which aimed at naturalness: it is to modify the face in a showy, hypervisible way, so that the exaggeration, the 4D imitation of a celebrity – from the lip to the cheekbones, nose – witness a social status, on a par with an expensive pair of shoes.

Carrie Bradshaw, in the 90s, in the glittering New York of Sex and the City, she was holding her important nose: it was enough for her to go around with her Manolo Blahniks to feel at the top. This model – the ramshackle writer in $ 400 shoes and the flea market dress – is no longer alluring to Generation Z. Hand in hand with an increasingly invasive role of technology on our bodies, and the increase in our freedom to appropriating this technology, the desire to show off today’s twenties has become more radical: it is the faces now that have to wear the bank account figures, swelling and modeling themselves in a grotesque way like when we created Facebook avatars. Girls no longer dream of Carrie’s screaming wardrobe but Cara Delevingne’s screaming cheekbones. They do not dream of the luxury villas of the OC characters but the plump lips of Angelina Jolie. The desire for flashiness becomes radicalized, capitalism becomes part of our bodies.

Especially in this two-year period, in which – thanks to the pandemic – the world is increasingly virtualising, the interventions also take into account how the light falls on the face during the daily meeting on Zoom. L’American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery stated that the main reason that moves patients turns out to be more attractive in selfies, and that the greatest influence comes from celebrities immortalized on social networks.

Antiviral, a 2012 film by Brandon Cronenberg, told of people going to a specialized clinic to have the viruses of various stars injected, because the level of adoration was such that they wanted to have something of them inside. It really happened: now we want Scarlett Johansson in the nostrils and Anne Hathaway in the eyes, Angelina Jolie around the teeth. If before we emulated the world of stars, now we are incorporating it.

Let’s watch Kylie e Kendall Jenner, Kim Kardashian e Ivanka Trump and we want not so much to look like them but to carry them within us: to feel that we have the same power, the same charm, the same money in the ATM.

In 1996, one Brian Zembic became famous for having silicone implants implanted in his chest. He did it to win a bet. The money, therefore, already had to do with it.

But now the bet that the 20-year-olds want to win is to look like someone else, and it coincides with the prize: to forget about yourself. It is precisely this eager race to be different that makes it necessary to establish ethical limits: how far it is permissible for a surgeon to allow us to act on our bodies, to chase the vain light of an Instagram filter, of a cheekbone copied by a star.

Of course, it is difficult to establish this limit, but we are starting to take measures, to calibrate the language: what we used to call “plastic surgery”, that is the series of operations we wanted to hide, is now called wellness medicine (“Wellness medicine”), underlining the difference between a physical manipulation aimed at improving the relationship with oneself and something more toxic and sinister that we still do not have the words to identify: how to define reshaping oneself according to the singer’s face more loved, like Oli London who made several interventions to become “Korean”? How to define the destruction of one’s features in the name of emulating an image, itself modified (a star redone, filtered by Instagram, unreachable)? And above all, how to fight it?

Norway, to put a stop to this phenomenon, has banned the use of Instagram filters unless explicitly marked: the filter is a weapon that exploits social insecurity, a filtered body feeds the idea that physical perfection is widespread and therefore it is only us, in our imperfections, who have to look for a drastic solution.

Curious that the word “filter”, from the Greek λίλτρον, comes from the verb ϕιλέω, “To love”: we “filter” ourselves to make ourselves more lovable to the eye that observes, but in doing so we undermine the love for ourselves.

So how should a surgeon behave? “We need to distance ourselves from assembly line-style work methods that give life to people all the same, made in series”, he replies. Luciano Perrone, associate doctor
AICPE (Italian Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery). «Our mission is to preserve and correct the anatomical shape towards a harmonious appearance, not to indulge patients’ bizarre ideas driven by a distorted and pathological view of one’s body ».

And how to distinguish without making mistakes? “When people come to my studio, the first step is to listen to them. The desire for an intervention in most cases cannot be confined to a matter of mere beauty.

There are aspects that deeply affect the intimate and psychological sphere of the person that must be managed with extreme caution because they represent the manifestation of a deeper malaise that the surgeon cannot and must not treat. One wonders where this eagerness to chase ourselves beyond the limits of the body will take us. Our world finally opens up to the possibility of becoming what we want, and this is splendid and important, but we risk forgetting what we need to protect from change: our uniqueness that time, unlike a scalpel, cannot scratch. , nor replicate on the face of another ».

PURPLE IN DEGREE
Writer and translator, she is the author of 4 books translated in various countries, including Settanta acrylic trenta lana. He lives between London and the writing residences of the world.

Collage of Mary Melancholy

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