Women do strange, unforgivable things to their faces. Women are mean to their faces. If their faces had a separate soul, they would tell these women: Please stop deforming me, please stop injecting stuff in me, please stop pulling and tugging on me, please stop starving me. If the faces had a voice of their own, they would ask to be left alone.
If a woman's face looks extreme—whether in its thinness, its smoothness or its plumped-uppedness—it's a safe bet that you're not looking at her true face. Her true face got left behind somewhere before she discovered bingeing and purging, cheek implants and porcelain veneers. A good example is Maria Shriver, the First Lady of California. For so many years we've been looking at her jutting bones and the thin skin draped over them like a silk blouse, her sunken-in eyes, and wrinkles prominent enough to be cut with an exact-o knife that it might seem as if this is her real face.
Not so. If we turn the pages of her face's biography a mere twenty years back, we will find her true face there: robust, plump, healthy, perfectly normal. At some point in her journey, Maria realized that being thin was the way to go, the only way to go, and it's her face that paid the highest price.
A similar specimen in face-mutilation is Faye Dunaway. There is something very Dorian Gray-like about her face. It might seem "young" because of its absence of sag and deep wrinkles, but it is for those same reasons peculiarly un-youthful. Because even in youth, humans have expression lines and they have creases. I've never seen a thirty-year-old without a single wrinkle on her forehead. And yet, Faye's 66-year-old forehead has none.
When one flips through the photo book of her face and sees just what its true state was once, one wants to get mad at Faye on her face's behalf, and say: "Faye, how could you stuff those little cheek implants in me? Faye, you didn't need to pull my eyebrows THAT far up. Faye, I wouldn't have minded if you let me develop normal, human wrinkles. And why did you have to remove my perfectly decent teeth and jab long, frightening veneers in their place?"
What would be her answer? Eternal beauty? Eternal youth? Fear, pain, obsession, boredom? But if one really wants to see the effects of a woman's inability to leave her face alone, one should look no further than Joan Rivers. The story of her face is well-known and oft-told, but it bears repeating here. What makes her case so truly frightening is that these days she wears a mask, plain and simple, but unlike other masks, hers can never be removed.
We will never know what her true face would have looked like at 75, because there is no more true face. It has been sliced, diced, nipped, tucked, stuffed, pulled, peeled clear off and in its place has been inserted this new face.
It looks neither young nor old, and yet both at the same time. 
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