If we allow them to age, our faces will tell our life story. In the contemporary world, faces are often a blank canvas to be manipulated with cosmetic surgery, injections, and intricate makeup techniques learned on YouTube. Other cultures draw attention to faces with displays of tattoos, piercings, and scarification. In some cultures, faces are veiled and hidden. Faces root us in our culture, in the rituals and rules about how we present ourselves and how we see others.

Our faces are the outer image we attach to our inner sense of self, to who we are and where we fit in the world. What do you see? Most of us would answer, “Myself.” Right: Adrea Schneider, the donor, in 2017. Faces, in evolutionary terms, helped us become social animals. This close study of faces is the way we all begin to understand the curious business of being human. Babies observe, respond to, and mimic our expressions as though it’s their job. Newborns turn toward them during their first moments out of the womb. Faces are the body’s workaholics: They confer and confirm identity, express emotion, communicate meaning, perform basic functions necessary for life, and enable us to experience the world through our senses. Our faces are the most distinctive part of our visible body, a mysterious mosaic of the physical and the psychical. Only humans are known to express dismay when looking at their reflections.Īs we scrutinize our own faces for wrinkles and flaws, we can fail to notice what a marvelous organ the face is. Dolphins as young as seven months will pose, twirl, and put their eye right up against the mirror to stare at their faces. Besides us, great apes, Asian elephants, Eurasian magpies, and bottlenose dolphins are the only other animals known to recognize themselves. We are members of an exclusive group: animals that recognize their own faces in a mirror. He says a silent prayer of thanks and takes the face to its next life. It’s an amazing thing, he thinks, what some people will do for others-to give them a heart or a liver, even a face.

Looking down at the face he carries, Papay feels a kind of reverence. Her transplant, the clinic’s third and the 40th known in the world, will be one of the most extensive, making her a lifelong subject in the study of this still experimental surgery. Katie will be the youngest person to receive a face transplant in the United States. With each second of detachment, it looks more like a 19th-century death mask.įrank Papay, a veteran plastic surgeon, picks up the tray, carrying it carefully in his gloved hands, and walks to Operating Room 20, where Katie Stubblefield waits. Surgeons, residents, and nurses, suddenly silent, gaze at it in awe as clinic staff, like unusually polite paparazzi, move in with cameras to document it. Soon they will take it to a 21-year-old woman who has waited more than three years for a new face.įor a moment, the face rests in its astonished solitude. Sixteen hours ago surgeons in Operating Room 19 at the Cleveland Clinic began the delicate work of removing the face from a 31-year-old woman who was declared legally and medically dead three days earlier.

The face lies on a surgical tray, eyes empty and unseeing, mouth agape, as if exclaiming, “Oh!” This story appears in the September 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. This is a story of trauma, identity, resilience, devotion, and amazing medical miracles. When she was 21, doctors gave Katie a new face. Are we our faces? Katie Stubblefield lost hers when she was 18. It’s our doorway to the sensory world, allowing us to see, smell, taste, hear, and feel the breeze. Our face conveys who we are, telegraphing a kaleidoscope of emotions. Yet we are asking you to go on the remarkable journey of how a young woman received a face transplant because it reveals something profound about our humanity.

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