Robert Downey, Jr.: A Double Standard for Attractiveness
I am always looking to understand what makes someone attractive. I find Robert Downey Jr. better looking now in his 40s than when he was in his twenties. Same thing goes for George Clooney. The gray hair and some wrinkles are not necessarily a bad thing in a gentleman. They connote authority and masculinity. What I have always said is that men and women both become more masculine looking as they get older. When I work with women, I aim to make them look substantially more youthful. With men, the aim is more complex and it is based on many factors that I need to consider.
First and foremost, I input my own aesthetic sensibility for a patient that overlays what the patient is concerned about. I do not aim to eliminate every single line on a man’s face or make the face appear completely filled in and perfect. Sometimes that does not look good. Things that do inform my approach is to ask a gentleman what his motivation is. If he is married to a much younger individual, then sometimes aiming for greater youth is important. Many gay men are interested in looking as youthful as possible as part of their aesthetic but I do not want to generalize that point too much as a simple category. Some men who are Type A perfectionists want their faces looking as perfect as their inner drive pushes them to be. Some men are trying to be more competitive at work and then they inform me how old the men with whom they are competing are so that I get a sense of what their desired endpoint is.
Older however is not always better in men. You do reach a point in one’s fifties and sixties that you simply just look haggard and not refreshed. Some men do not age as gracefully as others. Clearly baldness (which is not what is being discussed in this blog article) is something that if it can be restored in a man oftentimes makes him look more youthful and vital. When I am working with women, I truly try to encourage them to undergo fat transfer instead of fillers because I can make them really look a lot younger and more attractive (if they are old enough to warrant a fat transfer). With men, I offer them a more complicated discussion that can embrace the possibility of fat transfer or just simply fillers because men do not need to look that much younger in many cases. This discussion framed around a known celebrity, Robert Downey, Jr., is intended to discuss the complexities of working with men as compared with women when it comes to facial cosmetic enhancement.
Samuel M. Lam, MD, FACS is a board certified facial plastic surgeon in Dallas, Texas. To learn more about Dr Lam’s plastic surgery procedures please call 972.312.8105 to schedule a consultation. If you would like to ask Dr Lam a question about cosmetic surgery please visit our plastic surgery forum.