Before this year's Academy Awards event in Los Angeles, a remarkable uptick in cosmetic surgeries highlighted the radical lengths some are willing to go for appearance in our culture. Notable on this year's menu of procedures was the macabre so-called "Vampire Facelift," which extracts the patient's own blood, then re-injects it into the skin to restore that Dracula-esque youthfulness. It's a poignant picture of our search for eternal youth and beauty, in the shadow of Hollywood's red carpet. Says one cosmetic expert in the BBC's mini-doc on the procedure, "[For] Valentine's Day there's a run on chocolate, and anything red. Oscar week, there's a run on beauty."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Skin-deep beauty, that is. We in the church should love a little glam as much as anybody. But how can we help reorient hearts (and faces) to the beauty of the natural?