Makeup and Face Transplants

A fascinating question Fay Bound-Alberti asks in The Face: A Cultural History is about face transplants and how much of your identity is tied to the face you recognize in the mirror? The idea of waking up with a stranger’s face sounds terrifying. A transplanted face changes as it heals over the recipient’s own bones and muscles, so the final appearance is a combination of the donor and recipient. 

Isabelle Dinoire, the first person to receive a partial face transplant, described this adjustment over time. At first, parts of the transplanted face did not even feel like part of her body. Years later, she said, “I see a new face, and it’s mine,” while still recognizing that part of it came from her donor. That process also affects the people around the recipient. Friends and family have to connect a familiar person with a new appearance, while donor families can have the opposite experience. When face-transplant recipient Connie Culp met her donor’s family, the donor’s daughter said she could see some resemblance to her mother, especially around the nose. Some felt happy, seeing their loved ones face alive again. Others felt a deep sense of discomfort, as if their memory of the deceased had been tainted.

Makeup deals with the same connection between the face and identity on a much smaller scale. People can alter their apparent age, features, expressions, or even how recognizable they are without changing anything underneath. The key difference between makeup and face transplants is that makeup is reversible and a face transplant is permanent. We are comfortable changing our faces when we control the change. Face transplantation takes that idea much further because someone has to incorporate unfamiliar features into their sense of self permanently. That makes the psychological side of transplantation almost as interesting as the surgery itself. A successful transplant has to become a face the recipient can eventually call their own.