I think this is a fascinating site, specialising in before-and-after plastic surgery star photos, which I found via one of my regular favourites, b3ta.com. “Crap plastic surgery”, they call it, but I say that there’s a bit more to all this than just the chance to jeer at silly celebs with fat lips and boobs that go in an out from one year to the next. As always, where the celebs go now, millions more will follow.
One of my absolute favourites, Meg Ryan, as is pointed out at the site itself, has been made to look like Susan Dey (of LA Law fame). I adore both these ladies, but even so, what Ryan has done to herself is to me off-putting. She’s just not Meg Ryan any more, which I suppose it the whole idea. Presumably Meg Ryan was fed-up with making dark, serious, scary, explosive movies, packed with implausible action and profound human wickedness, and everyone saying “We preferred you in When Harry Met Sally“, so she decided to smash up her original face and change herself into something else.
When I first saw the MR “trout pout” on the cover of a trashy made-up-news-mag, I thought, ugh!! But maybe the magazines had photoshop-enhanced it. According to this it’s not too bad.
However, according to this, she’s turned herself into Molly Ringwald.
What Britain’s TV equivalent of Meg Ryan, Leslie Ash, has had done to herself is, however, truly scary. Google google. See what I mean.
What makes the Ryan and Ash lipo-enhancements so unnerving is that we’ve got used to these ladies with their regular faces. So when you see them now, you can’t forget that that isn’t the real shape of their faces and they’ve got bits of their bums in there. That’s not good.
And would you believe: Al Pacino? He seems to have said: “Make me look more like Dustin Hoffman!”
On the face of it this is all down-market tittle-tattle of the trailer-trashiest sort, of interest to the kind of lunatics who (like me) enjoy all the mad rubbish that b3ta links to, but to nobody else. But as so often with b3ta there’s deadly serious stuff in among the photoshopped squirrels with eagle-heads and pictures of weird people with huge eyes for no reason. It’s clear that something very profound is going on with our culture here. We have entered the age of the artificial body.
What’s going on? It starts with the obvious, which is that people who now want to change their bodies now can change their bodies.
It reminds me a bit of what Alice Bachini was blogging about yesterday, which got a lot of admiring attention. That posting was about a person changing their entire voice and become a different person, without necessarily meaning to. With plastic surgery, you change your entire look, and become a different person while very much meaning to, in much the same way that Meg Ryan seems to want to be a different sort of actress.
The strangest transformation of all which I found at Awful Plastic Surgery is that the charming Marie Osmond has had herself re-engineered into the monstrous Ruby Wax. Why would anyone want to make that transition? The answer is probably: she didn’t. Plastic surgery is still only a bet that it will turn out better than before rather than worse. (Ask Leslie Ash!) But already it’s a bet that millions are placing.
Personally I think it is all most undignified, like changing your name because you don’t like the one you’ve got.
Check out Axl Rose… spooky.
“Vanity is definitely my favorite sin.”
— Lucifer, aka Al Pacino, from “The Devil’s Advocate”
I have no problem with plastic surgery, but shouldn’t the changes be more subtle to be effective. What’s scary is that the celebrities, I assume, have access to the more skilled surgeons. When the work is done cheaply (sometimes for price reasons) or simply is just poor work, the outcome can be truly grotesque.
One other thing. I simply don’t understand some of the things people, who already possess natural beauty, change.
I used to have the hots for Leslie Ash (especially in “Men Behaving Badly”), but now she looks like a gargoyle.
As for Axl Rose… 400 tattoos on his body — plastic surgery is barely noticed.
Except for the really subtle stuff (Sarah Jessica Parker, for example), I tend to think most of them looked much better before they had “work” done.
What is it with the balloon lips? Do guys REALLY find this attractive?!
No.
The advantage is increased functionality, if not increased attractiveness.
My lord, Marie’s is the most disturbing of them all. Like mentioned in the caption, she used to be SOOO pretty. The dreadful surgery makes her look like a killer. She looks HORRENDOUS!!!!
Courtney Love is ATROCIOUS!! She looks like a flipping trout. And Lil Kim is disgusting!!! Let her keep ruining herself, it won’t change the fact that she’s been gross all along!
Please feature a picture of Victoria Gotti’s pillow lips after her televised collagen/botox injections.
Great site – why do these people do this to themselves ? It’s a sad commentary on our society’s values.
Her lips are so fake, it makes you wonder, do these stars think they’re fooling the rest of us?