WHEN CREATING BEAUTY WE ARE SATISFIED WITH LITTLE

 

Methods, surroundings
The surgery of beauty employs methods and is done in surroundings that are not even slightly beautiful. Scarify, elevate, scrape, suck, inject, cut, cauterise, pierce … these are the operations of our day-to day-work. They also distinguish any destructive action aimed at cancelling the classic values (so as to restore them again as soon as they have been assimilated) and they denote the bloody taste of the surgeon, a taste that sometimes is barely appeased, and sometimes exasperated by the need to respect the classical rules.
In both cases, the toy has to be taken apart so as to understand its structure.

 

Awareness
The surgeon who models the body following the ideal of beauty does so in ways and by means that are the contrary of beautiful. He is subjected to the same paradox whereby the actor must eliminate all emotion from himself so as to produce it in his audience, and the baker must sell his bread to earn his bread.
On the other hand, the highest satisfaction for any creator, great or small, comes from this feeling of self-denial, which is longer-lasting and more vibrant than the emotion produced by his identification with the finished work, which is a prelude to giving it up. Awareness always challenges and depresses the feeling of power.
What else can God have felt during the creation?

 

Self-reference
Epidemis demonstrated the inconclusive nature of narcissism with his examples of self-reference, which end up in absurdity. If for example I say that I make people beautiful who cannot do so themselves, and then I ask myself whether I can make myself beautiful, if I answer "yes", it means that I cannot make myself beautiful myself, if I say "no", I equally recognise that I cannot make myself beautiful myself.

 

Serve, enjoy, be silent (Rosmini)
One who creates beauty, paying the penalty of the above phenomenon of "depriving himself of his product" is however very capable of maintaining the external gradient of beauty at its highest levels, since he possesses the ability to perceive beauty in the infinitely small. In a word, he is capable of enjoying small things.

 

 

Reflections
The mirror is a great maestro. Painters of the 1500s used it to find faults in their work through the reflected image. We mainly use it to gratify our vanity. So the image that we see on its surface does not reflect our face, but our mask. The mirror is also the only means we have of seeing ourselves from behind, a privilege normally only given to others.

 

Angular symmetry
"The presence of a regular scheme always has a meaning" (W.W. Sawyer, Prelude to Mathematics).
"The man who possesses a highly developed awareness has almost no need to plan" (Maharishi Mahesh Yogi)
Surgical modelling of the facial profile, like cutting the facets on a rough stone that make it into a gem, is like putting a geometrical scheme in place. And the cephelometric analysis of the profile is reminiscent of the angular symmetries of precious stones, more precisely of the brilliant cut seen in profile, which repeats the three-dimensional order of the diamond.
But the geometrical interpretation of images that are generally held to be symbols of beauty also reveals some exceptions, details that escape from the geometrical rules of beauty.
With cephelometry let us try to examine images generally held to be symbols of beauty. In all of them we will discover some imperfections, some asymmetries: a scholastic quiddity in the negative that distracts the eye.

 

Beauty is atipical ?

Cephalometry
If you want to interpret an image, you should try subdividing it, transforming it into geometrical figures.
This is not a novelty, and it is not a theory from the digital world. It is a game that dates back to the Renaissance, when artists and princes had one mania in common: that of dividing everything into parts […]. Leonardo studied the relations that reveal the face's harmony, transforming the relationship between its different parts into angles […].
The division of the face is not only a question of cephelometry, but responds to intrinsic anatomical properties. The face can be subdivided into three parts: the skull, the maxilla, the mandible […], the principal nerve is called the trigeminal nerve - from the Latin trigeminus, meaning born with two others, since it is formed of three branches, and phrenologists attributed to them intelligence, intuition and sensuality […].

 

Lozenges
To remove small lozenges of skin removes years from the body. Provided that we can camouflage the cut along the lines of minimum tension or in an area concealed from view, to remove lozenges of skin is the simplest way, and it is also the oldest way, to firm ageing skin, to correct sticking-out ears, to reduce baldness.
The first surgeon to cut out small lozenges of skin, in progressive stages, was Morestin, a surgeon born in Martinique. His technique, which has been perfected with the addition of skin expanders and extenders, is still in use today, in particular for surgery to repair scars, baldness and skin tumours.

Charles Conrad Miller was the first to document the rejuvenating effects on the face, through photographs, after removing pieces of skin, mucosa and muscles. He also described his technique for filling facial wrinkles with injections of paraffin wax and of a mixture made up of gutta-percha and silk waste.
In 1919, Raymond Passot described his technique for facial rejuvenation by removing small lozenges of skin from the surrounding areas of the face. Erich Lexer performed the first face lift, on an actress who previously used to stretch her facial wrinkles using sticking plasters hidden behind her ears and among her hair. He removed the same amount of skin that the sticking plasters had pulled upwards.
Still today we work in more or less the same way. We deal with removing, adding, stretching, elevating skin, muscles and fascia (tegumental structures).

The face ages, exactly like a plum does. It loses water and becomes wrinkled. Now, to make the fruit return to a fresh state, you will need not only to stretch the dried skin, but also to restore the lost water, otherwise the result will look like a small prune of uncertain age, but still a dried one.
One of the problems, when we stretch the skin of the face, is that we may dampen the action of the mimetic muscles, those that reveal the authenticity of our intentions. The result can be an expression of eternal surprise, of an emotion corresponding to the vowel "O" and is becoming to a woman's lips, or of a frozen grin, which corresponds to the vowel "I". On the other hand, if the skin is not stretched enough, it will continue to reveal our age and our lies.

The art of rejuvenating the face through surgery must exploit four fundamental procedures: it must subtract, add, stretch and elevate - employing the techniques of cephalometry, which are as many as the different ways of cutting a diamond. The purpose is to give the face a natural and happy expression that is in harmony with the entire alphabet.

Supposing we do not want to learn the difficult art of protecting the body-mind from the wear and tear of space-time (as we should for such a precious thing) then we will of course turn to surgery. But we must take into account that the ideal techniques cannot be hurried, but tend to produce a gradual rejuvenation. Like a film played backwards, they go back through the phases of ageing and correct the signs of ageing a little at a time. We fill, we remove, we elevate, we stretch, preserving mimetic capacity and respecting cephalometric lines. Surgical rejuvenation must follow the same timeframe as would be needed to restore a portrait painted by a great master.
The face is not an exception to the rule of opposites: we have detected the solid symmetry of the crystal and the transitory roundness of fruit in it; we will now say that the face is like a flower. The tegumental layers are the petals that can be stretched and reinvigorated.

 

Remove, add, stretch, elevate
Four actions, common to many artisan crafts, that distinguish the surgeon's familiarity with the plasticity of the human body, the subject of his artisan work.

 

1. Subtract
"If you want to restrict, first of all you must extend" (Tao-te-ching)
When the surgeon is asked to reduce the body mass of an obese patient, he must first of all subtract the excess issue, then he must extend the skin, so as to close the edges of the discontinuities produced by the excision, and so to reduce the silhouette.
Subtract, extend, reduce […].

 

Fat

Fight club […]

 

Skin
At the third desquamation
"Already my skin is arching and cracking, already with renewed eagerness, the serpent in me seeks the earth" (Nietzsche) […]

 

The mirror of the soul
"The soul is reflected in the wrinkles of the skin" (The Book of the Ego)

The eyeballs float on the fat of the orbits like ping-pong balls on the surface of water. The orbital fat serves to soften blows, and the eyes are strong enough to withstand unharmed an increase in pressure that is enough to break the bony walls of the orbit.

The orbital region, deprived of the eyeball, can still express emotions thanks to the movement of the frontal muscles, the orbital muscles, the corrugator supercilii and the procerus; the mimetic muscles that move the forehead, the eyebrows, the eyelids. But the eyeball, deprived of the muscles and of the skin, becomes impassable, glassy, cold like that of a cyborg. It is not the eye that reflects the soul, but the tissue surrounding it.

 

 

Reconstruction of the orbital region

 

 

Learning from faces
You must also make divisions to interpret a character. Brain teasers don't make juice of the psyche, they grind it. We will be content with intuition, which […]

 

 

 

D r a w i n g t h e f a c e w i t h o u t a s c a l p e l

 

PLANTS, PAINT, RENAISSANCE, SKIN

 

Plastic, humanity's couch (The Book of the Ego)
"Let us try to think of how many things plants were used for, before the advent of plastic and other synthetic materials, and we will understand the importance this science (botany) has always had for mankind". In her handbook of botany, Mrs Rigutti invites us to reflect on the priority value of plant material over synthetic material.
Old sailors also brood about the appearance of plastic material, which they associate with the fibre of today's sailor.
The author explains that we owe the following discoveries to the study of plants: chromatography, the first principle of thermodynamics, osmotic pressure, Brownian motion, cell theory, genetics…
Plant material, then, has given us synthetic material and has started up studies on cell cloning.