The Secret of Beauty? a Wonky Smile

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Byline: Alice Hart Davis

AS THE popularity of cosmetic surgery continues to rise, we ask four leading plastic surgeons how they view the elusive notion of beauty. Are they arbiters of modern beauty or just reflecting back to us how we would ideally like to see ourselves? RAJIV GROVER Consultant plastic surgeon.

TECHNICALLY, what makes a face beautiful is symmetry and a strong central 'facial triangle' with bright, wide eyes, proportionate lips and minimal distracting features. If you look at Andy Warhol's silkscreen prints of famous faces, you will see that all he shows is the eyes, the lips and tiny dots to represent the nose. By emphasising just these, he automatically made the faces he worked with beautiful.

But it is not usually my own concept of beauty that comes into play when treating patients. As a surgeon, I have to make sure that I am not putting my sense of values onto them. I need to discover what they perceive to be their problem in order to see whether I can help them.

Having said that, many operations require me to make a judgment of aesthetics. If I'm doing a rhinoplasty [reshaping someone's nose], it's not just about creating a nice shape; I have to look at a nose in the context of …