To wear a face mask or not…

Wearing facial protection will soon become normal, according to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 spokesman David Nabarro in an interview with the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p089cz1s Despite conflicting evidence about whether face masks are effective in protecting people from Covid-19 (eg: eyes can still be recipients of the droplets), Nabarro said people had to come to terms with

Re-activating my blogging

It’s been 15 months since I last wrote a blog – and that’s partly because I’ve been very busy setting up an international alliance of NGOs that want to turn the campaign for Face Equality started by Changing Faces in 2008 into a global movement. It’s called Face Equality International and here’s the link: http://www.faceequalityinternational.org.

#WhereIsDisfigurement? Two classic examples

I fear we at Changing Faces* are going to have say this loudly and regularly: Barely a month passes without a government department, executive agency, public body, company or charity publishing a report or new policy on equality, human rights and/or disability and yet the issue of disfigurement is often ignored, excluded or otherwise forgotten.

Kathy Lacy – a woman of huge empathy who inspired thousands

It was with great sadness that I heard of Kathy Lacy’s death last Thursday after she’d been through a series of very difficult health problems. I’d seen her a fortnight ago and she was clearly in agony so it was a mercy. I first met Kathy (pictured above) at Victoria Station in July 1992 three

The birth of modern plastic surgery and the face equality campaign

The centenary of the cataclysmic Great War is happening all around us but is liable to be drowned out by last week’s European events. Let me call for a moment of reflection. We say on Armistice Day every November ‘we will remember them’ and we should this week. Lest we forget. On Friday 1st July,

Changing Faces sticks to its prinicples

Changing Faces has recently submitted its response to the review of cleft lip and palate surgical care in Scotland. It has been criticised in a few blogs and Facebook posts by some parents for supporting the expert Review Group’s recommendation that there should be a single surgical team based at the new Royal Children’s Hospital

Fashion, faces and the future

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Danka Tamburic, Professor in Cosmetic Science at the London College of Fashion because she is hosting a fascinating Symposium in April, Skin: The ultimate interface, to which I will be contributing with Henrietta Spalding. Our title is ‘Changing Faces: from stigma to face equality’. The meeting

World AIDS Day

Charlie Sheen’s recent ‘coming out’ as living with HIV shone a much-needed light on the stigma that still surrounds HIV and AIDS, and set me thinking about parallels with disfigurement. It’s more than thirty years since HIV was discovered, and more than twenty-five years since we lost some high profile names to the condition, such