The Coherence Aesthetic

I wrote this book after nearly twenty years of practice. It did not come from theory but from the patients: from observing, year after year, what made the difference between intervening upon a face and caring for a person.

The Coherence Aesthetic proposes an idea that is simple to state and exacting to sustain: beauty is not a property of the surface, but the visible expression of an organism in correspondence with itself. When the patient’s physiology, inner regulation and biography are in coherence, the face reflects it. When they are not, no technique applied upon the surface sustains its effect over time.

The book traverses, with clinical rigour and an essayist’s vocation, the biological, metabolic, hormonal, autonomic and biographical dimensions of the patient, and proposes a method that orders every intervention: understand, regulate, regenerate, and only at the end, refine.

It is neither a technical manual nor a popular work. It is written for colleagues who wish to practise a more mature medicine, and for patients who prefer to understand, before being intervened upon, what kind of medicine they are choosing.