Seventy Thousand Dollars Worth of Someone Else’s Face

Toby Sheldon is a 33-year-old songwriter from Los Angeles who spent five years and over seventy thousand dollars—his entire savings—on plastic surgery and hair transplants to look like Justin Bieber. Not to capitalize on a resemblance, not as performance art. Just because he wanted to look like him.

Justin’s smile makes him look incredibly young, Sheldon explained, in the way you explain things when you’ve committed to a course of action and need it to make sense out loud. He spent a month recovering from the smile surgery. His eyelids kept him sightless for a week after the eye procedure. You read these details and feel something—not quite pity, not quite admiration, something closer to awe at the specificity of the obsession. Most of us want to look better in some vague, general sense. Sheldon wanted to look like a particular person, down to the eyelid architecture.

My friends shower me with compliments—they even call me Tony Bieber! he said, which raises questions about the friends that Sheldon declined to answer. Whether those friends are real, imagined, or just being kind to a man who spent his life savings on a teenager’s face is left as an exercise for the reader. I’m not going to mock Toby Sheldon. He did what he wanted with his own face and his own money. That’s more conviction than most people bring to anything. It just happens to be conviction aimed at becoming Justin Bieber, which is its own kind of tragedy, or comedy, or both.