 Unital versus nonunital generation by a normal element

The unital continuous functional calculus has image $C^{\ast }(1,x)$, the norm closure of star polynomials including constants. The smallest closed star subalgebra $C^{\ast }(x)$ need not contain the ambient identity: for $x=0$ it is zero. In a nonunital algebra, apply the unital calculus in the C-star unitization and retain functions vanishing at zero to recover $C^{\ast }(x)$ inside the original algebra.