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Independent Online Edition > Europe: "Face transplant recipient Isabelle Dinoire faces the world
The recipient of the world's first lip, nose and chin transplant confronted the press yesterday to talk about the operation that restored her features. John Lichfield reports from Amiens
Published: 07 February 2006
Face transplant recipient Isabelle Dinoire faces the world Isabelle Dinoire

Isabelle Dinoire showed a new face to the world yesterday. To a storm of flash bulbs and camera shutters, she appeared before a two-hour press conference, sometimes bewildered, sometimes amused, sometimes irritated, but always dignified and courageous.

Mme Dinoire, 38, had the lower half of her face replaced two months ago in the first transplant operation of its kind. She put her rebuilt face on public view before the TV cameras in Amiens, in northern France, in an attempt, once and for all, to satisfy the world's (understandable) prurience and curiosity.

What do you look like when you've had someone else's nose, lips and chin sewn on to your own face? Remarkably normal, actually. Mme Dinoire slurred her speech. Her mouth seemed partially frozen open, as if she were under a dentist's local anaesthetic. Her lower lip did not move when she spoke, as if she was a ventriloquist. Faint scars were still visible around the oval of her transplanted features.

Otherwise, you might have passed her in the street and not given her a second look. She was a slight, pretty woman, with rather untidy, dark blonde hair. She could talk reasonably well. She could smile, at least partially. She could drink from a white, plastic cup (provoking another storm of camera shutters).

'I have a face again, like everyone else,' she said. 'I can open my mouth and I can eat. In the last few days, I have been able truly to feel sensation in my lips, my nose and my mouth.'

Asked to compare the way she looked now with her appearance before she was disfigured in an attack by her own dog last May, "