Tomorrow, friends and colleagues will gather at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center to remember Fredric Brandt, who died on April 5 at his home in Florida. Organizers of the memorial sought a space with enough seats for all the friends, colleagues, and patients who admired the dermatologist for his professional accomplishments and adored him for his kindness and irreverent spirit. Of course, the admiration and fame Brandt earned at the height of his career came with a downside: the many people who judged him for the way he looked.
Brandt never hid the fact that he had used injectables on himself over the years. "I've been kind of a pioneer in pushing the limits to see how things work and what the look would be," he told The New York Times a year ago. "Would I change anything I've done? I might not have used as much Botox, because you don't want to look quite as frozen."
Some friends and colleagues agreed that he'd gone too far, though his appearance didn't seem to affect his work as a physician. "Fred was larger than life and his practice was booming despite the consequences of his self-injections," says Roy Geronemus, a professor of dermatology at New York University Medical Center and a friend of Brandt's since medical school. Brandt joined Geronemus's Laser and Skin Surgery Center on East 34th street in the late '90s, splitting his time between New York City and his home in Miami. Geronemus did suggest to Brandt that he tone it down. "The large apple-cheek look was never something I was comfortable with," says Geronemus. "I spoke to Fred about the aesthetics of it and suggested that he should be more conservative in his self-treatment."
Brandt's appearance was undoubtedly polarizing. As many have noted, he was the subject of a merciless parody in the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. A glance at the comments section of almost any article written about him will reveal harsh judgments of how he looked. And he's certainly not the only plastic-surgery patient to be openly criticized. (Kim Novak at the 2014 Oscars and Renée Zellweger more recently found themselves on the end of a tsunami of Internet ridicule.) I have often wondered why people feel they can so openly mock someone they suspect has altered his or her appearance. In most cases, it's no longer acceptable to make fun of someone for the way they look (and rightly so), but a face-lift or frozen brow is fair game. And as David Sarwer, a professor of psychology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, told to me in an email exchange on the subject, "For people who don't believe in cosmetic surgery, complications and poor outcomes fuel their I told you so' mantra."
I believe there is another explanation for the aversion that inspires these cruel comments. In 1970, Masahiro Mori, a robotics pioneer and professor at Tokyo's Institute of Technology, proposed the idea of the "uncanny valley." He famously hypothesized that people would react with suspicion, anxiety, and even revulsion to robots that looked and acted human, but just missed the mark. (His theories have been held up by studies that show we're comfortable with humans or obviously mechanical robots performing a task, but not human-looking robots.) It may be that a face that's been obviously altered seems off to us in a way that's profoundly unsettling, even dangerous.
Brandt's many loyal patients knew they had nothing to fear from his deft touch. And I hope soon that we realize plastic surgery—like any choice a person makes to alter or accentuate their appearance—is just that, a choice, and one that should be treated with respect and sensitivity. Brandt certainly deserved as much.
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