Is anti-ageing wellness the same as looking attractive? Not according to a study, as researchers have found that even though facial plastic surgery may turn back the hands of time, it may not, alas, also boost your attractiveness.
For the study, which only involved 50 participants, the researchers showed the volunteers photos of 49 patients either before or after facial plastic surgery. The participants were asked to guess the age of each patient, as well as subjectively ranking their attractiveness. The results of the study revealed that while surgical intervention did indeed manage to shave a few years off the patients’ perceived ages, it did nothing to boost anyone’s overall level of attractiveness. According to study lead author Dr. Joshua Zimm, an attending surgeon at Lenox Hill Hospital and Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Institute of North Shore-LIJ Health System in New York City, the issue here is that patients’ expectations don’t match up with how the surgery will actually affect their wellbeing.
‘When we’re doing this kind of surgery I’m telling patients that they’ll look fresher, more energetic and less tired, and we have some data in the literature that indicates you will look younger, as we found,’ Zimm notes. ‘But clearly I cannot say that they will look more attractive.’ However, Zimm is quick to point out that the findings are based on the work of just one surgeon – maybe the 49 patients should have gone to someone else! – and there are also limitations to the design of the study. ‘This is not the final word on the subject,’ Zimm assures. ‘But certainly I think you can take away from this that if you’re looking to have aesthetic facial surgery to look younger, we’ve shown that you will. Beyond that … it is not clear that everyone will definitely look more attractive.’
For the study, which was published in the online edition of the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, the team of researchers focused on certain clients at a Toronto private-practice facility. Between 2006 and 2010, all of the clients had either had a face lift, neck lift, upper or lower eyelid lift, or brow-lift, and they were all between the ages of 42 and 73 years old. The researchers took facial photos – in which makeup and jewellery were forbidden – both before and six-months after the surgery. The patients were also banned from having additional cosmetic procedures (such as Botox injections or laser skin resurfacing) between the before-and-after photo sessions. The raters only ever saw a pre-surgery or a post-surgery photo of a particular patient – never both.
Zimm asserts that the findings do not accurately portray how your friends and relatives might react to any surgery you might have, as they will have a very clear frame of reference for assessing both age and beauty. He adds that the researchers may have created a ‘kind of subconscious attractiveness bias’ by asking the raters to assess age and attractiveness at the same time. However, he comments, ‘At the end of the day the goal is to make people happy, so we have to know what’s possible in order to determine if any particular patient is someone I can help.’
However, Dr. Laurie Casas, a senior clinician educator at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study, argues, ‘Certainly when I see a new patient I have to decide if what the patient is after is achievable or even realistic. And it’s a very complex process because the perception of beauty has to be evaluated by both the surgeon and the patient. The end game is that they want to look more attractive, but this study doesn’t get me anywhere with that process because it’s impossible to make any sense out of the data. It’s totally subjective, so the results have no meaning.’
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