Money can’t buy it. At least not all of it.

Cosmetic surgery is not unlike a bad friend or a fair weather boyfriend: it leads you on, promises a lot but rarely delivers, and slowly comes to preoccupy your mind until it reaches the level of a fixation. It’s also used best in small doses. Yes, a looker can ratchet up his appeal by thinning out his nose or maybe broadening his chin, but the idea that you could build a perfect human beauty in a piecemeal manner like you’re sampling from a platter is ill-advised. The goal may be, say Candis Cayne (as close to being Myra Breckinridge‘s “new woman whose astonishing history started with a surgeon’s scalpel” as any man or woman is likely to get), but the reality is more Amanda Lepore. Miss the mark of Brad Pitt, and you end up with Kim Vo. Dare to emulate Angelina Jolie, and the horror that is Octomom ensues.

“Pretty is just a lucky accident,” opined the troubled heroine from Cheerleader Camp, and that’s become my beauty mantra. It comes down to a serendipitous harmony of genes being passed on by two attractive mates, the stronger traits hopefully dominating, the right features maybe coalescing, and symmetry possibly balancing it all out. Even then the end result is still a wild card — you’d think that Hugh Hefner‘s union with amazonian Kimberly Conrad would result in some discernible physical presence of her in their two sons, but no, while Nick Simmons, plagiarist son of Gene Simmons, didn’t luck out despite having mom Shannon Tweed in the mix.

A surgeon can only do so much, and when he endeavors to recreate a person from the ground up, the combined folly of doctor and patient crosses the line from Galatean to Frankensteinian.

I find extensive plastic surgery rarely ever really works, especially on men. When I passed a soap actress on the street a few weeks back, even her waxy-looking silicone visage couldn’t compare to that of the man I happened by later that day, his face stretched so far back it reached Brazil proportions. I found myself actually wincing at the sight of him. Andy Richter once quipped that while he was co-hosting with Conan O’Brien he could always spot the male actors who had had face lifts because their side burns grew behind their ears, and I’m hard-pressed to name any male star who looks better after getting a major overhaul.

All the masculinity just gets stripped away, producing that effect we’ve all witnessed: Gay Face — a hard, arch, and sometimes witch-like, other times Karloffian cast to the gay male countenance that’s not always necessarily synthetic but is steadily becoming more commonly so. The look is turning up more and more in cities — and especially overseas thanks to more affordable procedures — and in clubs I’ve been noticing that guy who’s showing off his new face for the world to see is not so alone in his inexplicable lack of self-awareness about what he’s become.

You look at enough photos of the surgically-enhanced male, and the same features start appearing over and over, as if there were a paint-by-numbers template doctors were referring to. There’s the too-high forehead that occurs when the brow is lifted. The nose is always too thin and defined, like a woman’s rather than a man’s generally broader one. Cheekbones are high and gigantic, and lips are overinflated to parodic proportions. Skin seems too white and bleached, and it appears to have the texture of a stress ball if you touched it. Eyes are typically reshaped to become feline-looking and come across as too big. Glancing through photographer Mr. Toledano‘s photo essay A New Kind of Beauty, it’s actually eerie how gender-neutral the participants are, the men truly indistinguishable from the women were it not for their massively augmented breasts. Their appearance is more alien than conventionally beautiful, like the Draags from Fantastic Planet. My first viewing of the photos left me wondering how many people who’ve gone ga-ga over Avatar will get it into their heads that they can reproduce the look on terra firma.

One subject in particular, Hollywood hair stylist Steve Erhardt (left), has become something of self-willed freak thanks to appearances in tabloid TV programs that billed him as a living doll. The plastic surgery enthusiast has been quoted as saying his goal was never to achieve a “real” look, but instead something wildly over-the-top. It worked. I can understand his logic in a way — you take the idealized characteristics gathered from pop culture, and you combine them all into one form — but everything ultimately seems at odds with the whole, the features dissonant as the self is lost amid the Wildenstein eyes, the hyper-sculpted jawline, and the bolt-on pecs.

He’s joined by Russian make-up artist turned popstar Sergey Zverev (above right), whose own cosmetic forays have left him resembling one of the warrior elves from the late ’70s comic Elfquest. British TV fixture Tim Whitfield-Lyn was more focused in his goal: becoming the living embodiment of a Ken Doll. Surgery transformed him into Miles Kendall (get it?) and he became the companion to Cindy Jackson, the woman famous for having untold amounts of surgery to resemble Barbie. I find the ethical standards in the medical field curious; if you have Gender Dysphoria and you want to have sexual reassignment surgery, you’re required to go through a battery of tests and counseling before you can even step foot near a surgeon, but to fulfill your dream of looking like a toy, you can find some doctor who’ll agree to the procedure in any city in the country.

Where does this self-obliterating drive come from? Too much money? Too little self-regard? Obsessions tend to be ruinous, and so rarely does an extensive body upgrade ever work as intended as successful men go down the dark way of remodeling themselves into perfect packages. Michael Jackson was not the only self-loather bent on erasing himself one nip and tuck at a time.

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries (top left) is credited with making the retailer the juggernaut it is today, but his own rise came with some disturbing personal foibles in the form of curious compulsive habits, an insistence on surrounding himself with employees who are young and beautiful, and the extolling of a superficial business/hiring model vapidly constructed around an exclusionary “cool kid” mentality. At sixty, he’s put inordinate effort into reshaping himself into the square-cut jock image he tirelessly covets, and the end product is an obvious caricature: a decades-too-young hairstyle, humongous veneers, and a face implanted, pulled, and carved into a virtual mask. Clay Aiken‘s post-Idol alterations — either of his own choice or at the urging of his handlers — have proven as tragically self-defeating. In a bid to turn him into a heartthrob, all that it finally culminated in was effectively making him even more androgynous.

The frightful face-mangling perpetrated by ’90s porn star Lex Baldwin (bottom left) upon himself amounts to Gay Panic taken to the monstrous absurd; desiring to efface his gay porn tenure — long rumored to have outraged his porn-headlining family comprised of sibling TT Boy and uncle Dirty Harry — he succeeded in annihilating the perfect male face. Gone was the smoldering ruggedness, the thick jaw, the wide bridge of the nose, the full lips, and the curvaceous physique, along with any hint of ethnicity. In their place now resides something grotesque, falling somewhere between Pinocchio and The Joker as he goes through the motions of an unremarkable straight porn career under the awful moniker Talon — a fitting brand for such a traumatic and cruel rending of a man’s face and identity.

Designer Thierry Mugler (bottom right) enacted a similar decimation thanks to a serious case of bigorexia colliding with too much worship at the Altar of Butch. Steroids and HGH pumped him up to mammoth proportions, and his face achieved the polar opposite conclusion of Baldwin’s whittled-down kisser. Countless injections of facial fillers like Juvederm and Restylane broadened and distended his once-handsome and warm visage into a Mickey Rourke-esque glowering Death’s Head. Now in his sixties and self-dubbed Manfred, he’s become an urban legend in the New York sex club scene, a hulking Sasquatch prowling the back rooms and dungeons in search of men to carry off into the night.

Such is the terrible price of pursuing Perfection: it’s a summit so unreachable that it leaves all scalers lying broken and defeated at its feet, its spire unmoved and indifferent.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com