Study Shows Facelift can’t make you Prettier
JAMA (The Journal of the Medical Association) recently published the results of a study regarding facelift that are pretty interesting. While Facelift can really make you look younger, it doesn’t mean it can make you look also prettier!
A few words on the study. During 2006-2010 12 men and 37 women (with age between 42 & 73) who had opted for facial contouring procedures (like face-lifting) were photographed. Then the photos were rated by 50 random raters evaluated 200 (pre and post op) photos of the participants! Raters gave a score from 1 to 10 to the patients’ attractiveness accorrding to the photos and alsowrote down the age they estimated each patient was (again according to the photos). The evaluation results showed that while the raters noticed that patients were looking almost 3-year younger, the same didn’t happen with the “attractiveness” factor. In simple words the raters didn’t notice a significant increase in patient attractiveness after the procedures.
The author of the study, Dr. Joshua Zimm claim (affiliate of the Lenox Hill Hospital of New York) claims “[A] surprising finding was that we didn’t see a statistically significant attractiveness improvement,” This is why surgeons should be careful enough not to feed expectations that are unrealistic! “As aesthetic surgeons, one of the points we’re always very careful not to say is that ‘you’re going to look 15 years younger’ and the kinds of things that relate false or unrealistic expectations,” said Zimm. He also coments “One of the complexities of this kind of study is that we’re trying to objectify something that is very, very subjective, and there are a lot of pitfalls with this kind of thing,” and adds “Aaron Spelling said something to this effect when trying to describe beauty: ‘I can’t describe it, but I know it when it walks in the room.’”
Which means that while beauty is something hard to describe/define and therefore create, these cosmetic procedures will be proved unable to really gift a boost in patient’s beauty!
