"love is beautiful" - ahead of its time?

Who can forget the poignant 2001 ancient series that addressed humanity's value and definition of beauty? Love is Beautiful starred the brilliant (and missed!) Mariane Chan and Anne Heung, who gave one of her best performances to date. The series took place during the Sung dynasty and its premise revolved around two girls, Ling Wan and Chor Chor, both of whom are deemed the "ugliest" girls in a village renowned for beauties; Ling Wan has unsightly acne while Chor Chor has a massive birthmark on half of her face. Because of their common fate of being "ugly," Ling Wan and Chor Chor became sisters since childhood, growing up and facing the ridicules and discrimination from their fellow townspeople for their physical appearances together.

Ling Wan takes everything with stride while Chor Chor is extremely bitter. Chor Chor associates beauty with prosperity. She believes that "beautiful" people get everything that they want just because of their beauty, so she longs day and night to have this good fate. While Ling Wan is also "ugly," people are much more receptive towards her because of her kind heart. As it turns out, Ling Wan was feigning her unattractiveness because she wants people to see her inner beauty foremost. However, Chor Chor is convinced that Ling Wan's physical beauty is the reason why people like her. Her beliefs are furthermore confirmed when she meets Siu To (played by Marco Ngai), who can "magically" change someone's appearance temporarily by using a dough to form a new face. Chor Chor is able to live as a "beauty" (a refreshing Charmaine Sheh loaned her beauty to Mariane in her short cameo!) for a very short while and this experience makes her even more desperate for beauty as she begs Siu To to make the change permanent.

Meanwhile, Ling Wan meets and saves the emperor and she's set on becoming a royal concubine! Chor Chor gets into more trouble and even kills someone! Chor Chor's life is quickly going down the drain and she relates her failure to her unattractiveness and Ling Wan's good fate with her beauty... Siu To had mentioned to Chor Chor that Ling Wan had the same facial structure as her and was the perfect candidate for her face change. Chor Chor does the unthinkable and abuses Ling Wan's friendship with her. She abducts Ling Wan and begs Siu To to change her appearance forever.

Siu To performs his magic and then holds the faces of Ling Wan and Chor Chor in his hands. He switches the two girls' faces, changing their lives. Ling Wan now has Chor Chor's bad situations and Chor Chor now thrives in Ling Wan's seemingly perfect life...

The whole idea of switching faces and transplanting someone else's face onto another person seems all too fantastic, which is why this storyline takes place in ancient times. After all, the past is a big mystery to all of us. Sure, there are historical accounts, but really, who knows what really went on back then? The possibilities of the unknown are endless.

Recently, while sitting in my anatomy class, my professor mentioned a procedure called facial transplant. As he described the process, the first image that popped into my head was the scene in Love in which Siu To peeled off Ling Wan and Chor Chor's faces, switched them, and then placed them back on. (Odd how something from TVB was the first to come into my mind as I sat there in my sophomore-level class, huh?) Now, before you start thinking that this relatively new procedure is similar to the face transplant that Chor Chor received, let me state that it's not.

Facial transplant is basically a skin graft to the face. The surgeon takes the facial epiderms of a donor, reconnects all of the blood vessels, and then stitches the face back together. This procedure is useful for people who suffer from severe facial deformation (burns, cuts, and so on) in which cosmetic surgery can't help. Thus, the person has a chance to have a somewhat normal face again. The first partial face transplant was done in November 27, 2005 in France, in which they transplanted a nose and mouth onto the face of a woman who got ravaged by her dog. Full facial transplants have been done experimentally on dead bodies, but not yet on a living person. The first full facial transplant is planned for the near future; they are currently searching for a patient. Apparently, the surgery could take up to 20 hours and the success factor is only 50%.

Up until my anatomy professor mentioned face transplants, I had no idea that faces could be separated from the anterior portion of the fleshy head. Sure, I knew about masks and everything, but I always believed that "faces" were transfixed into the tissues that formed them. Since Love was fantasy, when I watched it, I thought the face removal was just as unreal as the whole face switching scene. Now that I know that the "face" can be removed, I have to say, TVB did an exquisite job with producing the "faces" of Mariane and Anne, very lifelike and detailed!

Did the ancient-setting Love is Beautiful predict a future before its time? Can the fantasy of Love become a reality? It's a relieving "no." Even if the surgery is successful, the recipient will not look like the donor whose face he or she received because facial bone structures do not match up exactly. Also, the donor has passed away, so there's no "switching." However, what if medical skills and technology advance so much in the future that scars will not be so evident and the face will look more "natural?" What if the surgery will always be successful? Will this prompt people who lust for beauty, like Chor Chor, to kill for a beautiful face?