My name is Dr. Norah Bates, and I used to be a plastic surgeon in Los Angeles. You may recognize my name; I am the reason why all women in Southern California look the same.

I didn’t make too much money starting out. I was young and new to the profession, and many people had plenty of money to throw at the more practiced doctors who had been operating on self-conscious women longer than I had been alive.
I generally operated on young women who came to Hollywood with the expectation of instantaneous fame and fortune. They’d wait two months, fail to get a starring role in the one or two movies they auditioned for, and blame their failure on their appearance. Then, when they’d turn to a plastic surgeon to make them star-worthy, they’d get stuck with me, the inexpensive surgeon fresh out of medical school.

Most of the women – and they were generally women – were too beautiful to have their faces reconstructed. All of them were more beautiful than I was. I wasn’t stupid enough to tell them this, though; I’d frown and pretend to notice the problems that they found on their noses, cheekbones, lips, you name it.

There was one girl named Amber who came in about five times. Amber was very pretty and very, very stupid. Like most of my clients, there was nothing in particular wrong with her face, but she seemed convinced that she needed an entirely new nose. That’s exactly how she put it, “a new nose” as if it were an accessory and not a body part. A month after her new nose, she needed new lips. Then a new chin. Then new brow bones, then new cheekbones.

“Good lord, Amber,” I said when she came in requesting a new eye color – a service that I clearly did not provide, but as I said, she wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box. “If you were going to have me change everything, why didn’t I just design you an entire new face the first time you came in?”

“Designing a whole face all at once? Wow, Doctor, if only you could do that!” she sighed, flipping back her long auburn extensions. Even though her expression was frozen from all of the surgery, I could tell that she really liked my idea. I liked it, too. And so would the needy, self-conscious young women of Los Angeles.

I closed my clinic for a week to focus on my project. It would be no trouble convincing people that they needed me to replace their faces, but I needed some basic choices to start out with. After my short time in the plastic surgery practice, I had a fair idea of what women wanted to look like. With that in mind, I sketched out a few generic faces for customers to chose from and slapped the drawings in a book. I took out an ad in Cosmopolitan – the number one magazine for women who think they’re ugly – and printed my business’s name, address, and this message:

Are you ugly? Are you disgusting? Do you need professional help with your icky, nasty face?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, fear not! Help is on the way!

Dr. Norah Bates, plastic surgeon extraordinaire, will make you a much prettier face – that’s right, the WHOLE FACE – for a discounted price if you mention this promotion!

I reopened my clinic the week that the magazine went out. The ad was expensive, but I was fairly confident that it would capture my target audience of sad women. So I waited. And waited. One hour passed. Then one day. Hour after hour slid away, each passing moment making my stomach knot. I sat at the receptionist’s desk as I waited; I had fired my receptionist to afford the ad. The second day passed with not a single customer, and I started to panic.

Then, on the third day, God gave me a miracle: a tall blonde woman with no sense of self-worth. Hallelujah! When she waltzed through the front door, filling the room with cheap perfume and a wave of Los Angeles summer heat, I thought that she was an angel sent from above. I leapt out of my desk and nearly tackled her before she had a chance to come all the way inside.

“Hi, hello, hi!” I awkwardly cried.
“Hello…” she said. “I’m here for the new face promotion?”

And so my empire began.

The generic faces were a hit. I’d operate on ten or fifteen women a day. They’d breeze into my office just like the first woman had: in a wave of perfume and heat and desperation. They’d sit in the stale, air-conditioned waiting area for a while, flipping through my books of face designs as one would flip through a magazine in a dentist’s office. Some took hours to decide, some minutes, but they’d all pick the same exact face, the one with a short nose and full lips and rounded chin and wide eyes. They only liked the illusion of choice.

I’d see them after work, in restaurants and bars and grocery stores and shopping malls. I thought, I can’t tell who’s who! I’m erasing the value of natural beauty. I should stop operating before I completely destroy the uniqueness of everybody’s appearances!
Instead, I opened up six more clinics around Los Angeles. I hired a staff of experienced surgeons and together we performed nearly 200 surgeries a day. Together, we created 2,400 of the exact same faces on different women every year. We doubled that the next year. Then we tripled it. I was seeing the generic face everywhere I went.

Once and only once did anyone protest my business. She was an old woman, seventy or eighty, maybe, with cotton candy hair and faded gray eyes. I figured that she wanted her face done – older women came in often now – so I asked her, “What can I do for you?”

She told me that she had traveled from Washington to see me, because her daughter just had one of my operations and she didn’t recognize her when she came home to visit. She wanted to see me personally and try to talk some sense into me. I was partially proud that word of my business had reached to Washington, and partially ashamed of making this old woman unhappy. I thought, 'Maybe I should stop. Maybe everyone wasn’t meant to look the same. I should listen to her. Instead, I offered her a discount operation.'

I retired at the age of 33 and moved to the East Coast. My empire lives on, constantly spreading like a disease. Soon it will spread from California to the East and launch out of the country, and then we’ll all look the same. Sometimes I ask myself, 'Should I not have created a society of women who all look exactly the same and think that the only way to be happy is to have a new face carved into their heads? Should I have promoted individuality and natural beauty instead? Was annihilating distinctiveness a bad idea?'

'Nah,' I think. What I did was fine. I helped these people. These people are happy.

Right?