Face Lifts - Fake News Or The Restoration Of Beauty?

'What do you think, Sarah', Betty Parsons asked her friend over coffee at Starbucks. 'A little nip and tuck here and there?'

'I'm all for it', replied Betty. 'We're not getting any younger'. 

And that little across the table conversation did it for Betty, and the next day she called for an appointment with one of Washington's most prominent cosmetic surgeons.  She knew the wait would be long - Washington had lots of money and many long-in-the-tooth matrons willing to spend it on a few more years of youthful looks. 

Betty looked in the mirror to assess the damage.  What would she need? A beginning turkey wattle which she had already covered over with an Hermes scarf?  Jowls? Saggy eyelids? And that slightly receding chin had bothered her ever since adolescence.  She had compensated for it by jutting it out just a bit - too much would have drawn attention to it - and she liked that symmetry that her effort gave to her face. 

She knew the doctor would ask her what she wanted, although some women left it up to them. They were the professionals after all and had done thousands of women, so they knew the ins and outs of facial harmony, reconstruction to the mean, and producing a face that while still the same one that came in the operating room, was one of surprising youthfulness and beauty. 

Betty was from an old, patrician New England family descended from old English stock, shipbuilders, traders, and financiers who built the new republic.  There was a social conservatism about these Boston families, a cultural pride in simple, elegant taste - Revere silver, Wedgewood crystal, Townsend desks, and Isfahan carpets.  They drove old cars to show their practicality, parsimony, and restraint.  They dressed in fine English tweeds and leather-patched the elbows rather than buying new ones.  There homes were fine, but never showy.  

 

The whole ethos of the community was adherence to traditionality.  They eschewed the modern, the garish, the temporary, and were examples of both the staying power of the American aristocracy and its cultural expressions. 

The idea of face-lifts went against the deep core of this ethos.  Altering your appearance, modifying it in an attempt to capture some youthful fantasy was unthinkable, a capitulation to all that was frivolous and unnecessary, a bourgeois preoccupation. 

Betty had long ago left the confines of Beacon Hill, married, and lived in one of Washington's old-monied neighborhoods.  Spring Valley was an example of patrician taste - classic Georgian homes impeccably landscaped, but modest in appearance.  There were no cultural intrusions in the neighborhood, neither architecturally nor socially.  It was an enclave of old English taste. 

Yet necessarily, the waves of American social change could not be excluded forever from Spring Valley, and while its occupants were still tasteful and reserved, they were modern in spirit.  While they still wore cultured pearls and black dresses on occasion, they were more often seen in something bright and sexy.  There was much to be admired about the old ways, but money simply could buy so much these days that there was no point in keeping it in the bank. 

Betty, given her heritage and the very innate sense of taste and cultural belonging that had been part of her family for over two hundred years, did have some brief second thoughts about her forthcoming facelift.  'Fake news', said a catty newcomer to her bridge group, a woman whose tarnished pedigree should have been fair warning. 

This hurt even coming from an arriviste, and it gave Betty pause.  Was she simply drifting away from her cultural center, becoming no more than a cheap American bimbo with a boob job?

There are margins of truth beyond which image cannot reach.  A face-lift can enhance the way a woman looks to others.  It is a restoration of the image she has always presented, and one which reflects who she feels she is.  A woman like Betty who had always been classically beautiful and whose classic beauty had been a feature of the well-heeled and well-watered society to which she belonged, felt it only right and reasonable to restore that beauty once it began to fade.

There was no point, she felt, in being like the Bostonians who were as proud of their sags and lines as they were of their patched tweeds and beat-up old Fords.  She had always thought of herself as a beautiful woman – her most telling and important characteristic – and if that beauty disappeared, so would she.

Facial reconstructive surgery – becoming a woman you never were – was another thing altogether.  Why should a woman, fated with the genes of unattractive parents, suffer that fate if she had the means to neuter them?  There was no pride in being thought of as ‘the smart one’, ‘the talented one’ when her desire was to be ‘the beautiful one’.  Women since Nefertiti have been prized for their beauty, a beauty the standards of which have not changed for 5000 years; so why not choose that universal virtue over others which had more than their share of rough edges. Besides, she wasn’t all that smart.



The Bostonians called the artificially beautiful woman vain and impressionable.  How long would her ‘beauty’ last?  Giving in to faltering good looks expressed an existential purity which the vain could never understand. Yet for her there was no vanity involved.  It was only a matter of consistency; and who was to say whether faithfulness to an image, a desire, a creation was any less valid that a spiritless acceptance of the ways the cards are dealt?

Vanity is considered a sin not because of its meaninglessness, but because of its exaggeration.  A woman who has a face lift to restore what was legitimately a classic beauty and the defining feature of her life should never be considered vain.  A woman who was never attractive but who has repeated face lifts, make-overs, and style upgrades to try to approximate a false, artificially-determined beauty is most certainly vain.

So, Betty's makeover would be a restoration, a reconstruction, not anything new or 'fake'.  She wanted to look again like the young woman who had always been considered the most beautiful of all, the woman of perfect symmetry, of classic line and shape, animated by a sensuousness and internal vibrancy that few women could match. 

What would be 'fake' about that?  She would not become another woman.  She would simply be that woman thirty years ago, just as vital, elegant, and alluring as ever. 

The surgery was a success, and once again heads turned, men whispered, and women marveled.  She bought a new wardrobe - a younger one, a snappier one, but still Armani and St. Laurent.  It was a complete transformation. Sh had been fitted and outfitted perfectly.  Everything matched, her symmetry was restored, and she walked with renewed pride and confidence. 

She was a new woman - well, the same woman restored to the original - and felt like a goddess, a Nefertiti, an Aphrodite.  It was the way of women.