In Hollywood, inner beauty is still skin deep
Vail Reese is the world expert on movie characters’ skin conditions. The San Francisco dermatologist can tell you anything you want to know about scars, birthmarks, tattoos, Jon Hamm’s vitiligo and the Austin Powers adversary Fat Bastard’s extra nipples, a spoof of the same condition on Christopher Lee’s assassin in “The Man With the Golden Gun.”
For two decades, Reese’s website, Skinema, has chronicled these abnormalities, which, he argues, too often appear on villains. For instance, in the movie “Grease,” he writes, “Pretty boy Travolta … musically drag races … the extensively acne-scarred ‘Crater-face.’ “
Reese sees how such conventions affec t hi s own patients. “It’s not just, ‘Am I going to look pretty?’ ” he says. “It’s, ‘Are people going to judge me?’ “
His work is a peek into how Hol ly wood e qu a t e s c l a s s i c a l beaut y with virtue, from Dis- In today’s Photo Extra, top images from around the nation and world.
Free to subscribers on the ePaper and at myPalmBeachPost. ney romances to James Bond bad guys to comedians making fun of Stephen Bannon’s face. Despite some progress, movies and TV still lazily perpetuate a notion we no longer believe: that looks correlate with character. When many in Hollywood are fighting for greater diversity and against stereotypes of all kinds, should that fight include types of bodies and faces?
“I t ’s overdue,” s ays Nanc y Etcoff, an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the 1999 book “Survival of the Prettiest.”
“Hollywood could do a lot to move us in a direction to widen our empathy and widen our notion of what is beautiful.”
A recent study in JAMA Dermatology found that six of the American Film Institute’s top-10 villains of all time have dermatologic issues, from Hannibal Lecter’s androgenic alopecia (hair loss) to the Wicked Witch of the West’s verruca vulgaris (wart),
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