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 Jane
and Joan Kochan have spent their whole life together. Their respective
marriages lasted only a short time and since then they have been
each other's favorite company. Joan and Jane live only a stone's
throw away from one another in Clearwater on Florida's west coast.
Every day from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon
they sit facing each other in the investment company Solomon Smith
Barney, where they are responsible for managing their clients'
capital — around 170 million dollars — profitably. The
evenings are short and are often reserved for dinner with clients
or a workout with their joint trainer and always entail preparations
for the next morning, which the alarm clock announces at five
o'clock. About three years ago, during a difficult economic phase,
Joan discovered signs of tiredness in her twin-sister's face,
which could not be cured by good cosmetics nor by lots of sleep
at the weekends. Jane saw the same symptoms in Joan's face. "We
don't smoke, we don't drink, we are not married nor do we have
any kids," they both thought and attributed the lines to stress
resulting from the fluctuating stock market. Moreover they were
both on the other side of their mid-forties. "We haven't wasted
any time thinking about growing old with dignity," as Jane puts
it.
Even as teenagers Joan and Jane were interested in fashion, dressing
in black in the pink and turquoise world of Florida. The tired
faces simply did not go with their wonderful fighting look, made
up of highly tailored suits, shiny buttons and solid gold jewelry,
a look they perfected over the years. One day Jane came across
an article about a plastic surgeon who had operated on more twins
than any other doctor.
During his training to become a plastic surgeon, Dr. Darrick
Antell had met a set of female twins, which aroused his interest
in this complex form of identity: one of the young girls had been
disfigured by burns. How difficult could it be for the two of
them —Antell asked himself — to look at each
other?
Later, after he had been in practice for many years on Park Avenue
in Manhattan, Antell traveled one summer to Twinsburg in
Ohio, where thousands of twins celebrate their existence as identical
pairs every August and where scientists recruit volunteers for
their research projects on cancer, multiple sclerosis and every
other conceivable illness. To Antell's surprise no-one
seemed to have seen aging as a subject for research. So he started
on the systematic comparison of the skin and tissue condition
of single-egg twins. Using hundreds of photos he demonstrated
impressively the influence of the sun and nicotine, nutrition
and worry on the physiognomy. Whilst most dermatologists regard
the sun as the worst factor in wrinkle formation and as evidence
point to wrinkle-free zones of the body which are protected lifelong
by clothes from the sun's rays, Antell attributes to cigarettes
the main role in accelerating the aging process: "Smoking is an
entire body problem, reducing not only the blood supply to the
skin, but also to the liver , the heart and the kidneys."
Even twins whose ways of life were very different and whose double
portraits looked more like before-and-after pictures of the same
people, were aware of the inequality only in the rarest of cases:
they saw themselves mirrored in the face of another person —
until Dr. Antell told them otherwise. Many twins decided
there and then to have an operation to restore the optical balance.
Joan and Jane had in face led almost identical lives and accordingly
their skins demonstrated hardly any differences worth mentioning
in terms of structure, yet under no circumstances did they want
to lessen the much-loved similarity of their appearances, by one
suddenly looking younger than the other: "We are regarded as a
unit," say Jane and Joan. The career women didn't want to change
anything in their double power image. For their 48th birthdays
they gave each other a facelift from Dr. Antell.
 Joan
and Jane, daughters of an Argentinean mother and a German Jewish
father, are blessed with good skin with lovely coloring. Most
of their friends advised them against the operation and instead
recommended a trip to a health farm, to get some rest. Even Dr.
Antell considers an operation in many cases to be premature
and refuses about fifteen percent of all potential patients, because
they suffer from a distorted self-image. He is regarded as one
of the most expensive doctors in his field and does not rely on
a large turnover of patients — for the New York Times
he calculated that Barbie, who had just turned 40, would have
to pay out about $53,000 to reconstruct her youthful perfection,
if she were not made of eternal plastic. A colleague would certainly
bill her for less for a facelift, tummy-tuck and hip liposuction.
But at Dr. Antell's the patients lie under warmed blankets
and they find chocolates on their pillows in the evening: he calls
his Park Avenue practice a five-star business, with a discreet
side entrance for the VIP clientele who — if they don't live
just round the corner — prefer to check into the neighboring
expensive hotels. He considers Joan and Jane as classic "baby-boomers"
— member of the post-war population explosion who confront
their cosmetic midlife-crisis with the weapons of current fashion.
With twins Dr. Antell always operated according to the
time of birth for "reasons of consistency." The younger twin has
to sit out the longer waiting period with an empty stomach, but
she has the advantage that the doctor is working on familiar territory
with her: "When I have operated on one twin, I know the second
one without looking."
Dr. Antell started by suctioning small deposits of fat
under both women's chins, and he removed from both so-called buccal
fat, the small deposit in the cheek which prevents and elegant,
firm face contour. Models particularly like this small operation
which only lasts a few minutes as it enables a better distribution
of light and shade. In days gone by patients used to have their
molars removed for the same effect.
Joan and Jane were satisfied with a lift of the lower half of
the face, which did, however, require extensive work on the tissue
lying below before the skins could be gently smoothed at the the
level of the eyebrows. The incisions are hidden behind the ears
and the hairline. Shortly after the procedure Dr. Antell
sent both sisters to a skin specialist, who reduces the swelling
and bruises in the shortest possible time with herbal cremes,
lymph drainage and individually selected combinations of vitamins.
Four days after their operations, Joan and Jane appeared for
a check-up in Antell's office, the fading bruises hidden
behind large sunglasses, and laden with shopping bags from Bergdorf
Goodman on Fifth Avenue. Dr. Antell was pleased. However,
even in this case he has yet again not succeeded in setting the
example he dreams about: he would love to prove on a single-egg
pair of twins that the benefit of a good facelift is never lost.
Even twenty years after the operation, one sister will look as
many years younger as straight after the operation. The chances
of finding an acquiescent pair to prove his theory are very slim.
Antell knows the issue with plastic surgery, not only for
twins, but for everyone else, is similarity: "...similarity with
the picture of oneself, which one considers as normal."
by Claudia Steinberg
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