tbf, I've looked at some of the other "after" photos of Erin Moriarty, and that one that's been widely circulating definitely is the most other/different from her original features. Could be an example of how a single still-shot can be misleading...the others don't look as butchered and you can see more of her original look in them. And as utee said, some of what we're seeing there may be makeup.....I have no idea.
All that said, it's obvious that it's not just makeup, it's definitely plastic surgery. Her entire cheekbone and jaw line is different. I've seen a few of our patients do this stuff, and the look is obvious. As you say, it winds up looking more generic, even when it does look good. And in this girl's case, her original face was much prettier.
I was listening to an evolutionary psychologist a while back and he was talking about plastic surgery and the botox craze, and why itss unsettling to people when we can't figure out why. He said we're hardwired to focus in on thousands of different facial cues that clues us in to what a person, especially a stranger, is thinking and what they're about to do. It's all subconscious, we have no idea we're processing it under the surface. Comes from a time when things weren't nearly so safe and everybody and everything had to be reasonably considered a threat until proven otherwise. So apparently facial cues, eye movements, cheek twitches, so many things....are all clues to us whether someone is friend or foe. I don't know how sure he can be about this, but he said in pre-modern times people who looked like this would've been quickly killed, due to the utter lack of cues given and thus deemed an inscrutable threat. So today we have a holdover effect that makes us uncomfortable, because we know people are generally safe, they aren't generally trying to kill us on an average day, and we're used to interacting with new people with no consequences....but there's that tiny instinct left in us that's saying "I can't figure that out, I need to kill it before it kills me."
