Plastic Surgery

Jim Carrey made a public appearance recently, and he was unrecognizable. If you told me that he was Jim Carrey, I wouldn’t have believed you. He had a lot of work done. There have been other celebrities who have gotten a little carried away with the plastic surgery—Lara Flynn Boyle (who I liked a lot) comes to mind. Renee Zellweger. Nicole Kidman’s work has been tasteful, but she looks freakishly well-preserved.

I am wondering out loud if extensive plastic surgery (aside from the occasional Botox or fillers) is a sign of some kind of mental disturbance. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I contemplated plastic surgery at one point. I have a turkey neck that I’d like to get rid of, and it makes me look like Cecil the turtle. I even tried this stuff called Kybella at an aesthetics spa, at $1,500 a treatment, and it didn’t work. I still have the turkey neck. But that’s just the beginning of my problems. Round face. Chubby cheeks. Potato-shaped nose the size of an eighteen-wheeler. Yes, I could change my appearance—I could get all this work done and look like Matt Bomer—but then I wouldn’t be me. And I’m pretty comfortable with who I am. I kind of like the idea of being someone who succeeds in spite of my looks, not because of them. I recently raised my hand to help out a group of students who were entering a hedge fund competition. I went to the website and looked at the judges, all hedge fund managers, all straight out of central casting. They tumbled out of the womb looking like a Brooks Brothers catalog. I guess if you’re a Ken doll then people want to give you money? Which is incredible to me.

Anyway, that’s about as far as I went with it. In some respects, I have good genetics. My 52^nd birthday is next week, and I don’t have a wrinkle on me. None. I am dissatisfied with my genetics, but I am not about to play God with my appearance, and I struggle to understand why some people do. I mean, there is some stuff that is easy to fix. I had a Coast Guard buddy whose ears stuck out like Dumbo. He found a bored Air Force plastic surgeon and he took care of it. I have no quarrel with that. My problem is with the type of reconstruction that is so extensive that it fools the facial recognition software. Rarely does this result in an improvement.

Still, I have a morbid fascination with plastic surgery, and have for years. Twenty years ago, I was a devotee of a plastic surgery reality show on FX called Dr. 90210. Lots of porn stars, strippers, and actresses as patients. Then, one day this girl walks in on her 18^th birthday and says she wants breast implants. She’s completely flat-chested. The doctor asks what size she wants, and she says, “Double Ds.” He explains to her that you have to work into successively larger sizes over time and that he can’t give her DDs on the first try, and she was crestfallen. She ended up with C cups. I was sitting there, watching this in my living room, and thinking that I actually liked her better the way she was. I like boobs—of all sizes. Even the small ones. Sometimes I like those better. I like fat asses and skinny asses and everything in between. This is a long way of saying that I’m not super interested in personal appearance. I am more interested in energy. I can tell within about 15 seconds if I’m attracted to someone, and it’s rarely about looks.

This isn’t virtue signaling. I know that the politically correct thing to say is that looks don’t matter, and I am saying the politically correct thing, and it is true. I’m also smart enough to say that it’s not as if looks don’t matter, because they do, but what I like about good looks is the effort that people put into it, rather than the God-given genetics. Anyway, the whole reason I am writing this is because I took a trip down to Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina today, to go to the only tailor that I trust. We went out for lunch. There is a reason they call Mt. Pleasant “Mt. Plastic.” It is a bedroom community of Charleston that has a lot in common with image-conscious Southern California, where the real estate is $1,000/sqft and there are plastic surgery clinics on every corner. Probably the highest per capita Botox consumption on the East Coast. There was a lot to look at. I walked by a table and spied a bottled blonde who clearly had some scaffolding, something you don’t ordinarily see in Myrtle Beach. Was she objectively good-looking? Yes. Was I interested? Absolutely not. Every once in a while, you find yourself someplace like this, like Scottsdale, Arizona, or Dallas, Texas, and there is this rich subculture of looksmaxxing. Thanks to Clavicular, we now have a word for it.

And it’s not as if I’m opposed to any sort of body modification, coming from the guy with two tattoo sleeves. I love people who adorn their bodies with art, especially if it is good art. And I’ve strongly considered getting veneers on my teeth. But there is something about this—and it is difficult to articulate—but there is something sacred about the face. It is who we are. Now, if you’ve been in accident or you’re a burn victim and you’re trying to restore your face to its default setting, by all means, have at it. But for a guy like Jim Carrey, whose rubberized, Stretch Armstrong face is known by hundreds of millions, his only currency, to completely change his appearance, is a bridge too far for me. Was he dissatisfied with it? Did he think he was ugly? Even if that were true, he was ugly in a very specific way that was recognizable to many (otherwise known as a Q score). He will probably never work again. Not like he needs to, but when people go to see a movie with Jim Carrey, they expect to see Jim Carrey. He has become a different person. And this is a newsletter about ethics, frequently, and I am usually more articulate in advancing an ethical position, and all I can say about this is that it just…seems wrong.

I suppose the counter argument here is that it’s still you, just a better version of you. So it is a matter of degrees. To the extent that plastic surgery can be subtle and artfully done, I am not too opposed to it. If you want the big, fat, collagen-injected dicksucking blowjob lips, and you end up looking like a platypus, there is not much that can be done for you. I hear that plastic surgery is really big in the UK, and there are advertisements on buses for cheap plastic surgery in Turkey. And everyone looks like a platypus. And everyone knows about South Korea, where plastic surgery is so widespread that everyone looks the same. I would prefer ugly Myrtle Beach to that dystopian hell. Facelifts are pretty common for older women. They are also pretty easy to spot—I am not fooled. There is something to be said for growing older gracefully. I mean. Could my own appearance be improved by plastic surgery? Let’s say I went into the doctor and he showed me a picture of what I could look like after the operation, and I would look like Clavicular. Assume also that the cost was low, the surgery was not too intrusive, and the recovery time was short. Would I do it?

No, I would not. This might be a topic for another essay, but there is such a thing as being comfortable in your own skin. Think of it this way—a month ago, I was DJing in front of 2,000 people. Pretty sure I was the ugliest DJ to ever pollute that booth. But also the best. In that moment, when the entire place had their hands in the air, do you think they were concerned with my pants size? Probably not. Would my reputation be enhanced if I told the doctor to make me look like Handsome Dutch Guy Hardwell? Perhaps. But I would be inauthentic, which is about the worst thing a person can be accused of, nowadays. In today’s culture, where everything can be bought, including looks, the one winning trait is authenticity. Not giving a fuck. By the way, the book about not giving a fuck was not really about not giving a fuck. This is about not giving a fuck. Mark Manson was onto something, but he published a word salad.

Be yourself.

P.S. This Substack is free. The irony is that I would have more readers if I charged for it, because then Substack would promote it. But I am never going to charge for it, because I have enough money, and I want to help people instead. I do appreciate the pledges, though. The upshot is that if you like my stuff, forward it to people and get them to sign up.

P.P.S. This coming Thursday, March 5^th, I am DJing in Nashville at Night We Met, a great underground club. A 4-hour set of melodic house, from 8pm-12am. You can RSVP here, or you can just show up. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Nobody ever told me they had a bad time at one of my parties.