ParfumGigi@aol.com

24 janvier, 2008 11:54

Celebrity plastic surgery is something I've always looked at with a mixture of scorn, pity and bewilderment. In a bit of January industriousness, I've been purging stacks of magazines and catching up on my tabloid reading, and I just can't get over how much bad work is out there. I'm not talking about extreme cases, like New York socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein and her terrifying feline makeover, Keira Knightley's digitally-enhanced rack in the Coco Mademoiselle ads or even the waxen Nicole Kidman, whose Madame Tussaud mannequin looks more lifelike. It's Kenny Rogers' recent eye lift, which has left him looking like a Chinese Colonel Sanders, or Burt Reynolds (who could easily star in a Charlie Chan movie) and the slew of twentysomething celebrities opting for very obvious enhancements.

In a recent interview, Helen Mirren explained that she was all for cosmetic surgery if it makes you feel better, but that she was still mystified by breast implants: "They seem a bit like hanging a pair of oranges around your neck." Clearly, the Dame and I have been reading the same tabs, with page after page of obviously artificial assets and, in this armchair aesthete's opinion, not-so-fabulous fakes. I ask the tabloid pages rhetorical questions. Was your surgeon cut-rate and simply not skilled? Are you clueless, and don't realize how fake they look? Or, in a culture where a fake is increasingly acceptable, are clearly defined half-grapefuits placed high on the chest the look you're going for?

Breast augmentation was the top plastic surgery in America last year and, judging by tabloid photos, tops in Hollywood, too. I'm most struck by the case of Heidi Montag, of the MTV reality hit The Hills. The 21-year-old starlet had rhinoplasty and went from an A-cup to a runneth-over C, then told US Weekly all about it last fall in a cover story called "Revenge Plastic Surgery." On Montag's skinny frame, her improbably high breasts, with their telltale half-moons, don't look much different than porn star Jenna Jamieson's. "Boys always made fun of me for being so flat," Montag confided in the tab. Well, she sure showed them. (Or maybe she's just hanging out with the wrong boys.) Do you pity or smirk at the person who has such poor taste? Do you disdain the cosmetic surgeons who perpetuate improbable bolt-on breasts? Do you empathize with the woman who has money and fame but still has the same body issues as the rest of us?

Fake being the norm in Hollywood is nothing new -- Jean Harlow's platinum hair certainly had no equivalent in nature. But having "good" plastic surgery used to mean undetectable, or at least, somewhat realistic-looking. Ashlee Simpson's cute revamped nose and High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale's similarly pert new proboscis are examples of what used to be acceptable, because both look natural. Bad breast implants are often likened to fruit, but when I spot a pair I think carrots. Flavourless genetically modified carrots have now been around so long we can't remember what real carrots taste like, and perhaps the same is true for breasts: We've forgotten what they're supposed to look like. That, or in an era of fake-bake and fake Goyard totes, attitudes about status and aesthetics have changed to the point where we've got a collective blind spot, like the cultural reverse of body dysmorphic disorder. Or, as Carrie Bradshaw might posit, "Is looking fake the new fabulous?"

It forces me to examine my own snobbery. Even if I discount the Heidi Montags and Tara Reids as flaky (i.e. they're not smart enough to know any better), I can't help but look at photos of Ivanka Trump and sigh with disappointment. Ivanka, not content with being a great beauty, a poised businesswoman and having the best legs since Cyd Charisse has, since her stardom on The Apprentice, showed off a more voluptuous figure on the red carpet, not unlike Montag (Trump's eye-popping curves even landed her on the cover of Stuff).

I wonder why anyone, but especially someone intelligent, would have work done that looks so obviously artificial. Why would someone in the public eye, on the red carpet daily and whose family album is a very public WireImage search, forego realistic enhancement? Why eschew verisimilitude, especially when you can afford it?

Would I be less offended if all these fakes -- breasts, lips, brows, noses -- looked natural and tasteful? There are those celebrities who don't ask for suspension of disbelief, like Pamela Anderson, who is totally camp about her cartoonish, pneumatic chest. Victoria Beckham is also (refreshingly) candid about her "silicones," as she called her breast implants in her reality show; neither expects anyone to believe they're anything but. They beg the toughest questions of all--of what's tasteful in the first place. It's like the fake-designer-bag quandary. Who do you disdain more: The person who pays $50 for a crappy knockoff monogram bag, or the person who pays thousands for the real thing, which is still an ugly piece of printed canvas?