On the Irony of Celebrity Facelifts (or Lack Thereof)

In today’s photo-frantic culture, celebrities and their appearances often are under intense scrutiny from the masses. Spotting cosmetic work has become a favorite pastime of gossip blogs and celebrity tabloids. Ironically, many of the supposed telltale signs of plastic surgery highlighted by the peanut gallery are the exact opposite. That is, many onlookers mistake the natural signs of aging as evidence of bad cosmetic work. Take the case of Catherine Zeta-Jones, 40, who was recently fingered by the blogosphere for her presumably disingenuous appearance at the Tony Awards. But according to the professional opinion of a number of local plastic surgeons, Zeta-Jones has had very little work done, if any at all.

It’s hard to say definitively what this means to us as a society. Shed in a light favorable to plastic surgeons, this perhaps suggests that we now come to expect celebrities to undergo massive cosmetic work by the time they reach their late thirties—but at the same time, we’ve become less adept at detecting it. In fact, the faces of those who have had aesthetic surgery look more natural to us than those who haven’t, as illustrated by the example above. With her eyelids beginning to sag, her lips and face losing some of its fullness, Zeta-Jones’s aging face may have seemed less conspicuous if she had eyelid surgery and a lip enhancement performed. Facial fillers and chemical peels might also help the actress meet the expectations of readers in areas where plastic surgery is popular, such as in Newport Beach. Facelift surgeries would probably be unnecessary for Zeta-Jones, according to the same plastic surgeons who opined that she hadn’t had substantial cosmetic work.

The notion that laymen are becoming more astute at noticing plastic surgery is misguided at best. If anything, the opposite is true – the signs of natural aging are more glaring than ever, even if we don’t recognize them for what they are. Our conception of aging gracefully has fundamentally changed – but not in the way that many of us assume.

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