What If You Could Change Your Face? | Unveiled

What if You Could Change Your Face?

For most people, our faces are an integral part of our identity. You see it every day and so does everyone you meet, and it’s the first thing people think of whenever they hear your name. But what if this vital component to our physical makeup wasn’t such a permanent fixture?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; what if you could change your face?

One of the things that makes humans unique is that we primarily rely on our sight to identify one another, while many other animals depend mostly on smell. We have the really quite remarkable ability of facial perception. It’s something which engages specific parts of the human brain, and we know this because some people have a medical condition called prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, which means they’re unable to recognize and remember faces. It’s thought that damage to certain parts of the brain is what causes this rare condition, which has notably been seen in some artists - including the artist Carlotta, who has painted around one thousand self-portraits, and every single one of them is different. At the other end of the spectrum, though, there are so-called “super-recognizers”, who are better at identifying faces than even the most complex computers could be. In an alternate world where changing your face was easy and routine, neither of these extremes would matter anymore; super-recognition would be an obsolete skill, and face blindness would be much less of an impairment, because now nobody would be able to confidently identify anybody else by just their face alone. It shows how confusing and chaotic the world could become.

Plenty of people have tried and to some degree succeeded at changing their faces already, however. Plastic surgery becomes more and more common with every passing year, and there are many celebrities and public figures famous only for having extensive procedures - sometimes with the aim of transforming themselves so that they look exactly like another specific person. The debatable success of these procedures and the financial investment required does mean that cosmetic surgery to this extent is still extremely rare, though… and it’s significantly time-consuming, too… so it’s not (and probably never will be) a viable way for someone to easily switch out their face; to change faces like they’d change an outfit, or put on a different hat.

Full facial transplants are another reality today but, as incredible as this new, transformative surgery is, it’s also an extremely intense and risky operation - usually done only to repair significant facial trauma. The first American to receive a facial transplant was a woman named Connie Culp, who was shot in the face in an attempted murder, in 2004, and underwent the painstaking 22-hour operation four years later, in 2008. But on top of the sheer difficulty of performing a facial transplant, as well as the debate around when it is and isn’t necessary, it’s a procedure which faces the same key issue as most transplants do: a shortage of donors.

As with other transplants, though, science may have already found an answer with human tissue cloning - which could one day, theoretically, eliminate the need for a donor completely. We’re now imagining a reality where someone is able to clone their own face beforehand, pre-empting a time where they might need or want a facial transplant in the future. In recent years, we’ve managed to grow specific appendages like noses and ears in the lab, with one woman once even growing her own replacement ear on the inside of her arm. It’s quite a leap from here to being able to grow whole faces, but if medicine moves in that direction then everyone could one day have a back-up for their most defining features.

In reality, though, even the most advanced facial transplants and cloning represent hugely invasive procedures. So, could there be any simpler, non-invasive ways to change your face in the future? Perhaps holograms are the answer. Or ultra-advanced, sci-fi style masks, as seen in Hollywood movies. Here, you wouldn’t be changing the actual physiology of your face, but it would still be a way to impose another face over your own - and you could feasibly choose a different face every single day. In a social sense, this would serve the same purpose; preventing you from being recognized and drastically altering your appearance, only without the need for long, difficult, and potentially irreversible surgeries. In the case of a holographic face, you obviously wouldn’t be able to touch it because holograms are intangible, but a convincing enough digitalisation might still fool a passing stranger.

So, what happens now? Everyone can change their face, and no-one can be certain who has? Daily life becomes a very different prospect. On the one hand, it would be harder, especially in terms of maintaining relationships. You’d no longer instantly recognise anyone; not your parents, nor your children, or your best friends. Not unless they had other physical characteristics on show, like distinguishing tattoos or a trademark item of clothing - and even those could be copied by somebody else. On the other hand, though, maybe that’s exactly what people would want… with an alternate, face-swapping reality almost inevitably tied to a desire for privacy.

Today, after the advent of the internet and the spread of mass surveillance, our right to privacy is a major talking point. Though CCTV cameras and tracking software are usually billed as security measures, it’s not as though people need to be doing anything illegal to want to hide their identity… they might just not like being watched and monitored, as a fundamental human right. Still, facial recognition cameras have already been extensively trialled in some parts of the world… while developers in China claim to have improved facial recognition tech so that it can no longer be fooled by just wearing an ordinary face mask. There are though, certain types of face paint which reportedly will still preserve your anonymity! In a world where flat out changing faces was easy and seamless, though, catching and identifying genuine criminals would be much more difficult… and cases of mistaken identity would probably skyrocket.

With ultra-realistic and/or holographic masks taking over, we could now be picturing one specific aspect of some kind of cyberpunk dystopia - where face and appearance is deemed totally irrelevant to the person inside. Someone’s physical body becomes more like an avatar in a game, with their face taken on and off at will. There are already companies today which specialise in creating photo-realistic masks to not only beat surveillance cameras, but to trick them into thinking you’re someone else… but, in an ultra-effective, face-swapping future, you’d have that power not just over cameras, but over everybody. Photo-ID cards would definitely be redundant, meaning everyone would have to provide more reliable biometrics - like fingerprints - whenever they needed to prove who they were. Perhaps there’d be some efforts to regulate mask-making and swapping - where mask-wearers have to register their new identity like a name change - but there’d also almost certainly be a booming black market for new, off the record faces.

In the most extreme version of this reality, we’d all have walk-in wardrobes… only instead of clothes and shoes on the shelves, we’d have faces. Or, we’d all have access to digital dashboards, where we could create new, holographic versions of ourselves for any occasion. If the authorities hoped to maintain any semblance of control, then face-swapping would need to be heavily regulated by law enforcement… but it would still take just one person changing their face unbeknownst to the government, and all faith could be lost in that system.

In the real world, there are a number of reasons why someone might need to change or alter their most defining features… but in a hypothetical future where swapping faces becomes an everyday freedom, the repercussions would be vast and unlimited… to the point where the concern wouldn’t be how long before you failed to recognise your friends and family, but how long before you failed to recognise yourself? And that’s what would happen if you could change your face.