if it guide someone to specific features that they think they want but ultimately don’t, it would not work and would feel terrible the entire time.
Further, who can know what one want to look like better than the person themselves?
Who can dream of how they desire to look like better than the person who want to look like a certain way?
Faces can look entirely different with just minute shifts, fat stored in slightly different places, differences of fraction of an angle, making a face is an art.
and like all art, it cannot please everyone, but it should please both the artist and the owner. (here, the one wearing the face)
having detailed specific facial features would be incredibly niche, and there is no guarantee that it would please the listener at the end even if they wanted the described features, because, how do you define hunter eyes? How do you define warrior skull? Do your definition of it match your neighbors exactly to the milimeter? if the angle is slightly too much or slightly too little the face would look entirely different, and maybe not what you envisioned in the first place.
In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maxwell Matz, a renowned plastic surgeon at the time, realised that quite often when people came to see him for surgery, it wasn’t because of a physical need such as a disformed nose or an ugly scar, but it was because the person complexed on a specific part.
they might have a perfectly normal nose but believe themselves to be ugly and undateable, the nose may become an excuse “I cannot date anyone because I’m ugly” when really what’s blocking them is their self-image and not the body feature itself. In those cases, changing the body without changing the self image often doesn’t do much.
ChatGPT details
In Psycho-Cybernetics, the central observation that led Maxwell Maltz to write the book was precisely that many people who sought plastic surgery were not actually suffering primarily from a physical defect.
As a plastic surgeon, Maltz expected that correcting a physical flaw would automatically solve the emotional suffering attached to it. In some cases, that seemed true: a patient with a disfiguring scar or prominent feature would become more confident, more social, and more successful after surgery.
However, he noticed something much more interesting:
- Two patients could receive equally successful surgeries.
- One would experience a dramatic transformation in personality and confidence.
- The other would remain insecure, anxious, self-conscious, or unhappy despite the objectively improved appearance.
This led him to conclude that the real issue was often not the nose, chin, scar, ears, or facial feature itself.
His famous insight was that people possess an internal self-image—a mental model of who they are—and that this self-image governs behavior more strongly than objective reality. If the self-image remains unchanged, external changes often fail to produce lasting psychological change.
In modern psychological language, Maltz was observing phenomena related to:
- low self-esteem,
- shame,
- identity beliefs,
- social anxiety,
- body-image distortions,
- and, in some cases, what would now be recognized as aspects of Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
His conclusion was essentially:
Many people think they are suffering because of a physical defect, when in reality they are suffering because they have incorporated that defect into their identity.
In other words, the problem is no longer:
“My nose is ugly.”
but
“I am an unattractive person.”
or
“I am someone who gets rejected.”
or
“I am inferior.”
Once that belief becomes part of the self-image, changing the nose may not change the identity. The person continues acting as though the defect still exists.
Maltz often described this as discovering that people have a kind of “face of personality.” He found that some patients looked in the mirror after surgery and psychologically continued to see the old face. Their internal representation had not updated.
An important nuance is that Maltz did not argue that physical appearance never matters. Quite the opposite. He saw many patients whose lives genuinely improved after correcting a real deformity or source of embarrassment. His point was that surgery succeeds psychologically only when the person’s self-image is able to incorporate the change.
This observation became the foundation of Psycho-Cybernetics:
Human beings act consistently with the image they hold of themselves.
From Maltz’s perspective, the surgery request was often a symptom, while the deeper issue was the person’s self-concept. Changing the body could help, but lasting change required changing the internal model of self.
What’s interesting is that modern research on body dysmorphia, self-schema theory, cognitive behavioral therapy, and predictive processing in neuroscience has ended up exploring many of the same themes from a more rigorous scientific perspective: perception is not just what reaches the eyes; it is filtered through beliefs about oneself and the world. Maltz’s formulation was not scientifically complete, but his clinical observation—that changing appearance alone often fails when the underlying self-image remains unchanged—has held up remarkably well.
What I fear with such a title, is that it might induce changes the person doesn’t want, and thus induce body dysmorphia, making the person feel even worse about themselves ultimately.
Through imposing a peculiar style externally rather than giving tools for transformation and letting the person actively choose how they desire to transform themselves, both internally and externally, so they can become someone they admire and find beautiful.
If you have trouble with clearly envisioning how you want to look consciously (your unconscious perfectly know how you want to look, hence why you find some face aggreable and others less aggreable)
I’d advise coupling the shifting title with Mind’s Eye or with Essence: Clear Sight (maybe as a name embed?); or maybe meditating while looking at faces you judge aggreable and would like to ressemble more; or by doing visioning exercises, or with a combination of these.
any of these should make your vision clearer on what you personally want for yourself.
[Edit: One thing I would add, while changing the body may not change the self-image, the concept of self, changing one’s self-concept and self-image often lead to the body following suite.
I suppose this is the way shifting subliminals are currently working, by changing one’s the self-image and giving the physiological tools that may be used by the subconscious to induce physical changes, such as “if your fat move away from the eye socket and go to your cheeks your eyes would look more radiant, if you put more pigment and more humidity on your eyes they will look more magnetic” or in whatever direction the title direct shifting. But like, nothing is forced, I don’t think.]
