A small town is abuzz this week after a local resident was completely transformed by a common beauty procedure.
“We do hundreds of facial peels every year, and this is the first time we found a totally different face underneath someone’s face,” said Kimberly Choi, of Choi Spa & Salon. “We have no idea what happened. She came in looking like Cobie Smulders and left looking like Jennifer Aniston in Cake.”
The client, Talia Pederson, was often told she could have been a model. “I had a really nice face,” says Pederson. “People really liked it.” But everything changed when she decided to get her first facial peel. She left the salon with an entirely different face.
Gone were her sculpted cheekbones, her strong nose, and her inviting smile. In its place were slightly asymmetrical eyes, an expanded forehead, and little mini jowls.
“It’s not that the peel made her ugly,” insists Choi. “She literally has a different face, and this one is just average.”
Typically, facial peels require up to a week of recovery, and doctors had hoped Pederson’s old face would reemerge as she healed. Although Pederson admits her skin had never looked clearer and more vibrant, she says, “It’s weird that my face is a different face.”
“Losing my face was hands-down, the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Pederson said. “Worse than the time I was forced to choose between staying at some guy’s beach house for free in the Hamptons, or some other guy’s beach house in Fire Island.”
Discovering a new face underneath a face is rare, striking only one in 500 million women. For some, the change is a welcome one. Others, like Pederson, can go from Charlize Theron to Charlize Theron in Monster in an instant. Still others adopt a gruesome, squid-like appearance.
“I look like a squid now,” says sufferer Tameka Oluo. “I hate it.”
As for Pederson, she spends a lot of nights looking over pictures of her old face, thinking about the person she used to be.
“My new face changed everything,” Pederson said. “I used to date a lot of financial types and high-powered attorneys. Now, it seems the only people interested in me are people who work at Lenscrafters.”
There are, however, some positives to Pederson’s new, dumpy-looking face. Friends claim she has developed the beginnings of a sense of humor. She has also recently been introduced to the concept of empathy.
“It’s easy to forget other people actually have feelings and concerns when you breeze through life so easily,” Pederson said. “Now that I’m no longer allowed in clubs or getting jewelry from designers for free, I’m learning that maybe we’re all the same underneath our faces.”
She quickly adds, “Also, some of us are very, very different.”
