Advances in facial reconstruction

What happens to our self-belief and society's perception of us when our faces change through injury or disease? This depends not only on the severity of the damage but also on factors such as how the damage occurred, the age when it developed and the victim support network available.

The increasing importance of the face to self-esteem has resulted in a burgeoning desire for treatments to convert faces to the Hellenic norm and arrest the ravages of aging. Emotional and financial success is often associated with youthful vigor rather than elderly experience.

We can think of the face as an underlying skeletal scaffold made up of highly complex bony architecture with air sinuses to lighten our heads so we do not drag them along the floor.