Giving plastic surgery the bad rep of ‘factory face’

You’ve likely came across ‘Portrait of a Gangnam beauty’ or ‘Gangnam beauty’ cartoons on the Internet at some point in your life. They are satires on the phenomena of faces losing their individual uniqueness with plastic surgery, appearing awkwardly monotonous and looking like they’ve had work done. From the viewpoint of a plastic surgeon, it is a portrait that has instilled in me a sense of self-accountability.

[Image source: Google]

Harmony and balance are the basic fundamentals of beauty. A face is not perceived beautiful if it lacks this harmony and balance. Ideal plastic surgery accurately pinpoints areas lacking harmony and balance, and makes these aspects harmonious and well-balanced. It is in the same context as the ‘natural beauty’ that I emphasized in a previous blog that awkward faces that appear to have had work done are by no means what you would consider beautiful.  

There are several reasons for this phenomena of faces all appearing similar after plastic surgery as depicted in these cartoons.   

Foremost being excessive and awkward cosmetic surgery. Let’s take rhinoplasty for example. Koreans basically have heads that are wide from side to side and narrow from front to back, making for plain faces in general. If you were to raise the nose excessively on such a plain face to resemble that of Caucasians, it can only be left looking awkward. The same goes for eye surgery. Relatively large eyes are obviously attractive but if the eye sockets or size of eyeballs themselves were originally small, excessively widening the eyelids or making overly large double eyelids to make eyes look bigger will make them awkward, as you would expect. Moreover, because the head itself is plain shaped, overdoing facial fat transfers or fillers to add dimension to a plain face will result in an awkward looking face as in the cartoon.  

Then, it’s getting such excessive and awkward plastic surgery on many places on the face. It looks unnatural even if one part of the face looks awkward but if such plastic surgery were to be done on several areas, you will really end up with a monotonous face that looks awkward and apparent that work was done. This sort of face can never be more beautiful than a natural face.  

From the viewpoint of plastic surgeons, performing the same surgery without analyzing each face individually is way more convenient and simple. Identical surgeries being performed without analyzing the face overall are essentially to blame for giving plastic surgery the bad rep of ‘factory face,’ and the backdrop of ‘Gangnam beauty’ cartoons.  

Ideally, plastic surgery should be performed in the direction of bringing out the uniqueness of each individual. Surgery should be in the direction of enhancing the strengths and making up for the flaws on each individual’s face. Cosmetic surgery always needs to take into consideration the harmony and balance of each face overall to create ‘natural beauty.’

As I stated before, performing uniform surgeries would be convenient and simple. Conversely, grasping the characteristics of each individual, planning for each individual, and performing surgery as appropriate is a complicated process that involves much more time and effort. However, performing customized surgery bringing out the uniqueness of each individual rather than 'factory face' surgery is a process that we can never forgo to achieve ‘natural beauty’ even if it’s difficult and time/energy consuming.   

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