The year is 1997. FBI deputy director Sean Archer (John Travolta) is about to have the ultimate lunchtime tweakment and Face/ Off with malevolent terrorist-for-hire Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage). Elsewhere in Hollywood, Angelina Jolie is growing out her Hackers pixie crop and plucking her brows to the finest wisp for her role in supermodel biopic Gia. That same month, down the road in Orange County, a baby is born.
She has her own cherubic face, her eyebrows are yet to grow, be bleached and pencilled back in, but as Gabriella Leigh Bechtel rolls around in her nappy, she dreams of abandoning her surname and adding a Les Mis level ‘ette’ to her name to become an influencer sometime around the 2020. Concurrently in LA, Lisa Rinna — an actress, model and ‘entrepreneur’ — is married but not yet a Real Housewife. In her ovary, budding daughter Amelia lurks, waiting to hatch and bring these seemingly unrelated tendrils of Californianhistory together, in the year 2023.
Because as you read in Katie Puckrik’s piece, we now live in the dystopian era of one-stop-shop plastic surgery, which means face stealing has become all the rage. Perhaps not the same murderous rage as in John Woo’s schlocky action classic. And we’re not quite transplanting one face on to another. But, as Gabbriette and Amelia Gray grew up and morphed into early prime Jolie clones — and with it, clones of one another— we’re seeing that homogenisation is coming for us all.
The ‘evil twins’, as Gabbriette and Gray have been dubbed, are not alone in carving out same-face tribes. Model Amata Alp and even Kylie Jenner have joined the ‘Succubus Chic’ gang: black hair, skinny poker-straight brows, expressions glum. Who needs an It girl when you can have a ghoul? Meanwhile the ‘snatched’ look (sharp features, fox eyes, all taught and shiny) has united Gen Z tastemakers Hailey Bieber, Anya Taylor Joy and Bella Hadid underneath their various hair colours. Hadid in turn is looking less like sister Gigi, and more like Carla Bruni with every passing ‘facial’.
It tends to be Kylie lips and either Kylie or Kim jawlines
‘You can see social media cloning occurring, especially among young women,’ says beauty editor Nadine Baggott. ‘I called it the Kardashianisation of beauty... Even Madonna had a Kardashian-type makeover on her recent tour; the thicker brows, fuller lips, the taut, full face.’
Award-winning aesthetic doctor Sophie Shotter says while she avoids celeb-based conversations, her peers still report the Californian sisters to be the main surgery inspiration. ‘It tends to be Kylie lips and either Kylie or Kim jawlines,’ she says. ‘In fact, there are some clinics which have capitalised on Kim K or Kylie J treatment packages.’
But Francesca Ogiermann-White, editor of Tatler’s Beauty & Cosmetic Surgery Guide, finds it surprising that actors and models would rescind their individuality. ‘Their face is their fortune,’ she says. ‘So, it’s almost bizarre that they want to look like one another.’
No one is sure what’s behind the merging of Gray and Gabbriette’s faces, unless there is a Face/Off remake coming, where the two must unlock each other’s iPhones to save the world. But it’s become obvious it’s not working for Gray. Eagle-eyed TikTokers spotted her hitting out at fans who compared them in her comments section. ‘These comments are no longer allowed,’ she replied. For Dr Shotter the homogenisation of people’s faces is ‘sad’. ‘Every face has its own beauty,’ she says. ‘My job is to bring that out.’
‘There’s always a case where a patient might use a celebrity as a reference,’ admits Ogiermann-White. ‘Especially when they’re trying to articulate what they want to achieve — like pulling a picture from a magazine at the hairdresser’s.’
Dr Shotter says that when people start following certain trends, like an arched brow or an upward tilted eye, ‘Then it can be that they all start looking very similar.’ Fortunately, treatments can only take you so far. ‘They can’t give you an anatomy you never possessed,’ she says. Even though beauty is skin deep then, those blasted bones will keep us (mostly) true to ourselves.
