The Face Doctor

Wouldn't it be cool if you could hire somebody to explain your face to you? Or rather, if it were a medical practice you could set up an appointment for? Face-reading, face-consultation, face-assessment. Like palm-reading, but rooted in the understanding of bone-structure, muscle behavior, and genetics, instead of some gypsy chart. Wow, that sounded awful.

I can imagine myself at my first appointment, talking too much, all neurotically preemptively diagnosing myself. "So, my face is asymmetrical, right? Like my nose goes a little to the right. And my cheeks are different sizes, see how they fit differently into my mouth/upper-lip region? Is cheek-size dictated by jaw structure as well as the cheek-bones?"

For some people, face-consultation would be the necessary precursor to plastic surgery. Tell me what I'm made of so I can decide what to keep, what to discard. But in most cases, the Face Doctors would be working independently of the plastic-surgeons. The mission of the Face Doctor would be to make you like your face better by eloquently describing its every last idiosyncrasy. Like psychologists rather than psychiatrists, the Face Doctors would talk with you and help you understand your face, sending only the most neurotic and inconsolable on to plastic surgeons and facial reconstructive surgeons, or psychiatrists who could prescribe anti-depressants.

For your appointment, you would be asked to bring in pictures of your grandparents on both sides, your mother and father and your siblings at different stages in their lives--at young-adulthood, middle-age, etc.--and the Face Doctor would point out similarities, far beyond the obvious. The Face Doctor would also be able to explain how personality works with the underlying structure to determine facial outcome, following your every expression, roll of the eye, pursing of the lips. In this way, the Face Doctor would be a kind of palm-reader, studying appearances to tell you much more about yourself. And they wouldn't be real MDs, but rather PhDs in some newly-named field that would combine psychology, neuroscience, and anatomy, "Faciology" or "Facial Therapy."

According to the online MediLexicon, the face region is defined as the "topographic subdivisions of face, including nasal, oral, mental, orbital, infraorbital, buccal, parotid, and zygomatic." Synonyms: regio facialis, regions of face. It's times like these I wish I had friends in the medical field so I could bombard them with these kinds of vague, semi-answerable inquiries. "So, how do you go about studying the face in medical school?" (pause, wrinkled brow) "What are you talking about?"

So what do you think? Not quite material for a screenplay, along the lines of Gattaca or Eternal Sunshine, huh. Anyway, it was just a thought I had.