Exaggerated Features
The bottom line, stresses Los Angeles plastic surgeon Ben Lee, MD: Plastic surgery should be about balance and proportion. “The goal should be to subtly enhance features, not to distort or take things to unnatural extremes. Along those lines, surgical results that are way outside the norms—too tight, too high, too big—are undesirable. The old adage that ‘the enemy of good is better’ is one of the guiding principles of plastic surgery. Plastic surgeons have always sought to produce natural results, but it doesn’t always seem that way. We would rather enhance features and turn back the clock than totally transform how a patient looks. However, in some populations and geographic areas of the country, certain looks become trendy, and surgeons respond accordingly. Social media picks up on these trends, and makes it seem that we like to produce extreme results.”
“Consider, for example, facelift. The procedure is one of the most powerful tools we have to rejuvenate the face. However, the perception among the public is not always a good one. The popular perception is that patients tend to look overly tight. It is true that there have been some highly visible people in the public eye who have an overly done appearance. Nevertheless, the emphasis in modern facelift is to place sagging structures back where they used to be. The result is that patients look a decade younger, rather than pulled. After all, we simply replace tissues to their original position rather than pull them to places they were never meant to be. Hopefully, patients will come to realize that natural, balanced results are preferable to overly exaggerated features.”
