I concur that you need some basic competency in photo editing before you start to photoshop your face :-)

Surface Blur, I think, is good either in subtle amounts (you DO want to sharpen the skin differently from e.g. eyes or hair) or -- since we are talking about "artistic edits" -- you can go completely overboard and make a fully plastic face. That is also fine as long as you understand this is going to be an in-your-face :-) image and not the I-tried-to-look-pretty-and-failed one.