Oh No! Not Michelle....!
In the Land of Nip n’ Tuck, Or a Right Carve-up....
Bear baiting may have been banned for quite a few centuries but spotting celebs who’ve been under the knife is a blood sport that is alive and well, especially in America, but probably just as much in England and Australia nowadays. The dark side of all the media extolling stars and celebs, is their tearing down. What a complex tripartite dance there is here of love, admiration, obsession, contempt and hatred - between the stars, their public and the luxury goods industry, who use the former to grow fat off the latter and generally stoke the fires of this unedifying spectacle.
To see pictures of the wreckage of a great beauty like Rita Hayworth arriving tired and emotional at London’s Heathrow airport in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease is simply tragic. But what is one to make of the sight of pretty young women making themselves gross and vulgar, stuffing their lips and chests with unnatural substances, risking their health and permanently ruining their good looks in the process? That’s not tragic, it’s silly.
And what about the doctors, good bad and indifferent who cater to this trade, who run the gamut from real artists sculpting flesh with creativity and sensitivity to inept and money grabbing butchers in it to get rich? It is not for nothing that cosmetic surgery has long been the fastest growing sector of private medicine.
If Rita Hayworth, suffering the ravages of Alzheimer’s is tragic, what then are we to make of women of talent, beauty and character but of a certain age like Faye Dunaway, Mary Tyler Moore, Marsha Mason, Angie Dickinson and now, alas, Jessica Lange and Madeleine Stowe, who have ruined their still striking but aging looks by bad facial surgery. If women as well connected, rich and famous as these get their faces wrecked what chances have other women when they elect to go under the knife to preserve their youth and beauty?
Though they had this done to themselves it is still sad, both for them and us, to see these talented and iconic women go into late middle age with unfamiliar and unnatural faces. We grew up with them. One just wishes that they could have tweaked things here and there a bit and left it at that. But no, here they are with strangely stretched “Slavic”, faces from the steppes, chipmunk cheeks and curiously diminished eyes.
Does it always go wrong? No, for some famous women it seems to have worked, more or less. Glen Close looks good. Lauren Hutton, Catherine Deneauve, Jane Fonda, Raquel Welch, Liz Taylor, Barbara Strisand, Michelle Pfeiffer, all of whom have had “work” done to one degree or another still look pretty good for their respective ages without becoming travesties of their former selves, though sadly Michelle Pfeiffer seems to be getting it more wrong than right recently. Of course nobody is going to admit to a facelift if they don’t have to. “It’s good genes, my dear, not the surgeon’s art”. They wish! Gravity has its way with us all. But what would be really interesting and is the billion $ question, in this town anyway, is how many people are there out there who look young beyond their years, have had a facelift but nobody can spot the tell-tale signs. And, above all, who performed the procedure! That’s a perennial top conversation here in the Hollywood/Beverly Hillsnexus.
I mean, it’s not a hairdo we’re talking about here. A botched hairdo or a bad stylist can spoil your day, or three weeks tops. You can get it re-done or wait for it to grow out. But a lousy facelift is hard to make good and you may have to live with the result for the rest of your life. And yet that’s what people do, they go see a cosmetic surgeon in the same way they pick a hair stylist and after very little discussion they trust him to fulfill their dreams. I mean what hair stylist or cosmetic surgeon is going to give you a true evaluation of their capabilities? Of course they’ll tell you you’ll look like a million dollars when they’ve finished with you.
It’s not just the middle-aged and old that go in for cosmetic surgery. The young do it too, mainly lip & boob jobs but also faces botoxed into robotic immobility. And pretty silly most of it looks out there on the “red carpet”. The media and blogs have a field day jeering at the Young & the Foolish. Trout pout, sex doll mouth, duck lips, fat lip, clown’s lips are the regular taunts hurled at celebs who’ve overdone the collagen. And when it comes to breasts I really have to wonder whether the surgeons who perform these augmentations and the women who have them done, have ever really looked at womens’ breasts properly, so strange are the projections sported. They look like large grapefruit halves weirdly and immoveably stuck on the chest, hefted way up under the chin like an 18th Century milkmaid, with not a hint of natural shape or hang.
Dangerously perhaps, getting your lips and boobs pumped up is seen as no big deal. The first doesn’t last and you can always change the latter. Sometimes, more often than you might suppose, things can and do go wrong. Any surgical procedure can be dangerous, even fatal and, less dire, can have unforeseen and unpleasant results you might have to live with permanently.
The UK TV actress Leslie Ash of the series” Men Behaving Badly” is a case in point. She had collagen injected into her lips and a facelift and wasn’t happy with the result. She made the mistake of publicly likening her state to that of Heather Mills, Paul McCartney’s wife, who lost a leg in an accident and got short shrift from both the media and the public, who unkindly christened her “Trout Pout” and said what she needed was a brain transplant not a facelift.
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I know I didn’t really need to do it in other people’s eyes - and that’s a great compliment. But I’m 43 and your top lip disappears when you get to that age”, she said. Leslie has since undergone corrective surgery but to no avail.“Some days it’s fine, but if I get water retention I can get it on my lips. It’s a nightmare”.
Let’s not be too hard on poor Leslie and others like her. Whatever your age most of us have a hankering to be more beautiful or handsome than we are and to look as good as we can. And, if you already do look good, and work in a very tough town fighting to “make it” or stay “up there” while a thousand beautiful and talented newcomers flock into town after your job, then it is perhaps understandable if you feel you need to improve or “update” your appearance. The sad thing is that so many of these people either make freaks of themselves or spoil the looks they already have.
This need to improve on nature has now spread far beyond the entertainment industry in Hollywood and permeated the entire city of LA, if not Southern California. Everyone’s at it. The magazines and airwaves are awash with adverts touting all kind of cosmetic procedures and promising success and the life beautiful to almost anyone with a few thousand dollars to spare. Everyone now feels they have the right to be beautiful and are encouraged to pursue their dream. Given the industrial scope of it all, is it any wonder that there are the large numbers of botched jobs and disappointment? And don’t think for one minute that men are not affected by the same desires and compulsions. They are, as the list of male celebs getting themselves fixed clearly shows, it is just they are nowhere as much pressure to be perfect as are the women. We’re not just talking Whacko Jacko here.....
Clearly tinsel town has got it out of all proportion, if not gone mad. You have only to take the briefest of glances through the celeb mags to see the grotesqueries routinely performed on bodies young and old. And these people are supposed to be the ones to emulate and admire? Hardly. It seems much more like some tribal/societal rite where certain members of the tribe are showered with riches and in return are expected to maim or sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of the group. Or should that be vicarious pleasure?
I reckon women (and men) should by and large try and grow old gracefully.Good presentation, fitness levels and vibrant health can do wonders for how you look. Far more effective than carving up your body, with all the risks entailed and which doesn’t last in any case. And if you really, really want to tweak things a bit, go for it, but do it in a minimalist way, avoid the full facial at all costs. That way the risks are far less and it won’t be so obvious. Above all do your research and don’t just put yourself in the hands of a non-specialist doctor, operating on the cheap and in it for the loot.
