titlehere; In a field dominated by men, surgeon Haideh Hirmand is redefining the plastic fantastic.(Interview)(Biography)

Publication: Vogue

Publication Date: 01-MAR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Byline: Julia Reed

When Haideh Hirmand, M.D., was thirteen years old, she was walking down the street in Tehran when a concrete block fell from the fourth floor of a building, hit her in the back of the head, and slammed her, facedown, into the asphalt. Her nose was smashed; her mouth was smashed; the doctors checked her hourly for brain damage. "I thought I was going to die," she says, and when she didn't, she tells me, she learned two things. "One, I came from this traditional, conservative background, and the accident made me realize that your life can change in one second, that we all have to be very thoughtful and live life like this is it, because it could change tomorrow." Two-and here lies the impetus toward her chosen profession-"it drove home the meaning and value of appearance. I was a teenager, and all of a sudden I didn't have a face. I was absolutely horrified. And it started me thinking, Why is it so important to look normal? Why is it that people like good-looking things?"

Hirmand has a face now, obviously, and it is certainly good-looking, though not the homage to perfection created, and prized, by some of her colleagues in the field of aesthetic surgery. She jokes that her nose is in fact "a pinnacle of imperfection" and asserts that an entirely wrinkle-free face-"unless you're 20 or 25"-is just plain "weird." One of the few women in her field (more than 87 percent of plastic-surgery patients last year were women, while the number of female surgeons hovers, astonishingly, at just below 10 percent), she is self-effacing, funny, and refreshingly frank, but only if you ask her to be. On the subject of my upper eyelids, for example, she tells me I have "pretty deep shadow space and a really nice hangover without much fat loss." Good things, apparently. But when I press her on what she could do to improve them-or, more to the point, to make them look slightly more like those of the 21-year-old me whose photograph I have shown her-she says, "Look at me straight." After some scrutiny, she pronounces my "tiny bit of skin excess" as "50-50. If you're emotionally ready and you want to take...

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