What happens when you take a natural and stunning beauty, and surrender her portrait to the harsh pen of a plastic surgeon? Her picture ends up with more marks, crosses, and dotted lines than a road map.
Photographer Marc Erwin Babej asked his friend, plastic surgeon Maria M. LoTiempo, M.D., to view portraits of gorgeous models through the clinical lens of cosmetic procedures. Click to see the results -- each model's picture is superimposed with LoTiempo's "updates," which were all geared toward achieving geometric symmetry (a so-called beauty ideal by today's standards).
The markups are visually jarring (these are gorgeous faces), but also highlight this sad truth: there's no room for individual and imperfect beauty -- whether it's a characteristic bump on the nose, an overabundance of freckles, or wide set almond-shaped eyes -- in plastic surgery. Now that you can purchase a butt like Kim K's, a nose like Kate Middleton's, or lips like Angelina Jolie's, our ideals of beauty are totally and completely skewed.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that we support this Barbie-fying, but his portraits do show us plastic surgery's scientific pitfalls: These women may not be perfect in the eyes of the surgeon, but the scientific methods of plastic surgery aren't so perfect either. I mean, we all know the sad story of Heidi Montag.
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