Celebrity Plastic Surgery

Recently, I got a e-mail from a former employee, an attractive young nurse who had moved out to the West Coast. In it, she comically mentioned "not wanting to look like some Hollywood-style bad plastic surgery victim", and asked me for some recommendations about who to see out there. But it got me thinking...

I spent some time looking at "bad celebrity surgery", and started to notice some patterns. I think it boils down to a combination of facial distortion, loss of one's distinctive initial appearance with reduction of recognizability, and the "stigmata" of poorly performed or ill-advised work.

Here is my highly opinionated list of "problems to be avoided", if at all possible.

1. Excessive botox - particularly in the glabella and medial forehead area, when it can drop the position of the inner portion of the eyebrows, giving a diabolical or "vulcan" look.

2. Excessive lip fillers. While a full, pouty lip can look youthful and pretty - there is a limit. The upper lip should certainly not be larger than the lower lip. Respect the anatomic details of the lip - the lip should not look like a sausage. In general, straight men should avoid lip augmentation, as it can feminize the appearance.

3. Facial fat removal. As we age, we naturally lose our facial fat. Removing it surgically with liposuction or direct excision, in order to give a more "sculpted" appearance, can be a set-up for a skeletal, gaunt appearance in the future. And it's hard to fix.

4. Cheek implants - are not a substitute for a facelift, and do not make a good replacement for loss of facial fat. Poorly performed cheek augmentation can distort the facial width, or look like a chipmunk storing nuts in its cheeks. Cheek & chin implants can work wonders for people that don't have good underlying bone structure - if they are properly sized, and meticulously placed by an expert.

5. Overdone rhinoplasty. An excessively thinned, pointy nose, with distortion in the nostril area or visible irregularities. Celebrity gossip pages are full of these.

6. Unfortunate facelift results. We'll talk more about this in future posts - but "pixie ears", loss of hair in the temple area, peculiar direction of cheek wrinkles, visible scars, the "tight face-loose neck" combination....these are all tip-offs that a facelift didn't work out very successfully or had some technical problems.

7. "Tan-orexia" - when your skin tone is the color of pumpkin pie from the over-use of self-tanning products, it's not good.

8. Too much of everything / too young / too many operations. Trying to slow aging is one thing. Starting to look like someone else is another.


Best wishes for 2009!