Enhance

Let your skin to reflect your youthful self.

One of the goals of Cosmetic medicine is to help the patients who seek our help, to “improve” their appearance.

Before considering any possible treatments that have the goal of enhancing attractiveness, we need to learn about our patient’s motivations. Patients asking for cosmetic treatments in reaction to a stressful life event need to be supported and referred, as do patients with an overly self-critical assessment of their appearance (such as patients with body dysmorphia).

This is actually quite rare at MIRA Clinic. The majority of MIRA Clinic’s patients come to us with a realistic self-assessment that there are minor ways in which their unique natural appearance might be tweaked or subtly altered to improve their overall level of attractiveness. Our patients don’t want to be drastically altered, they don’t want to lose any of their individuality, but they would like to learn about any possible ways in which aesthetic treatments could help them to look a little bit better.

Its foolish to rely upon social media trends or intuition to decide on exactly how to help with someone’s appearance. In order to properly improve someone’s appearance it is fundamentally important to have a detailed understanding of what specific characteristics have been shown in the scientific literature to be more attractive, thus creating an objective basis upon which to make these assessments and recommendations.

There is actually a very large amount of scientific research centred around evaluating people’s impressions of pictures of faces in order to define and quantify the facial and body features and proportions that are considered the most attractive. The team at MIRA Clinic regularly review this research and reflect on the conclusions of the research in order to properly grow their knowledge on how to objectively understand which proportions and features are perceived to be more attractive than others.

An excellent example of a scientific publication that helps us to understand some of the specific attributes to attractiveness can be found in a scientific paper published by Greg Goodman in 2015 in the Dermatologic Surgery journal1 where he analysed the face shape of 21 famous women who were widely regarded as being highly attractive. Professor Goodman concluded that all of these purportedly attractive female celebrities shared a common oval face shape. It was only symmetrical in 3 of the individuals – which goes to show that symmetry is not that important to facial attractiveness. But the proportions of this oval face shape was quite consistent across the range of celebrities analysed.

The average oval facial shape of these women was subsequently constructed from “an average bizygomatic distance (horizontal parameter [widest distance between cheek bones]) of 4.3 times their intercanthal distance (ICD) [the distance between the inside corner of the eyes] and a vertical dimension that averaged 6.3 times their ICD.”

In this diagram you can see the reconstructed oval face shape from Professor Goodman’s publication overlaid on the face of one of MIRA Clinic’s patients (who has given her permission for her image to be used in this blog post). By using the oval face shape defined by Professor Goodman, we were able to determine and advise on the best treatments to improve her overall attractiveness and still ensure she looked natural and did not look like she had received any cosmetic treatments.

Mira clinic patient with professor goodmans oval ideal female face shape overlaid - mira clinic - 1
Mira clinic patient treatment recommendation - mira clinic - 3

In this image you can see the areas that, if altered, would help her face shape to look similar to the ideal face shape defined in Professor Goodman’s 2015 article1

When it comes to helping patients to look more attractive, I believe a solid understanding of all of the many published articles researching the aesthetically ideal face shapes and proportions are vital for the skilful aesthetic practitioners to properly assess and treat aesthetic patients. After all how can you help someone with their appearance if you don’t have any objective basis upon which to make decisions on what changes might be beneficial?

Here is the “before and after picture” of our patient after undergoing a series of tailored treatments aimed at helping her face shape to more closely resemble the ideal face shape.

Mira clinic patient after undergoing a series of tailered treatments to subtly help her face shape more closely resemble an ideal shape as defined by peer reviewed scientific journal articles 1 - mira clinic - 5

We want to strongly emphasise that it is so important to understand that this type of information should only be used wisely and with restraint and compassion.

A systematic approach of comparing every potential patient with a theoretical “ideal” is very wrong and very condescending. We should celebrate the things that make us all look unique and we must never try to bring attention to imperfections in others, especially if the goal is to encourage someone to seek treatment that they might not have otherwise considered.

Comparing potential cosmetic patients against theoretical ideals is something that should only be done after a thorough consultation is performed and the potential patient has demonstrated a reasonable desire for knowledge about potential minor aesthetic improvements.

MIRA Clinic practitioners are trained to only make recommendations for aesthetic treatments when they truly believe those recommendations will be in their patient’s best interests.

When you choose your clinic to provide you with aesthetic treatments, we strongly recommend you only choose clinics that have a track record of undergoing continuing education and using scientific data to justify their treatment recommendations.

1. Goodman, Greg J. FACD, MD*,†. The Oval Female Facial Shape—A Study in Beauty. Dermatologic Surgery: December 2015 – Volume 41 – Issue 12 – p 1375-1383

People will stare.

Make it worth their while

HARRY WINSTON