Often when I’m scrolling through Instagram, hypnotized by the stream of videos, an actress’s face will cut through the noise. This isn’t a typical clip from a press junket or red carpet. Instead, it will feature side-by-side images of the star, one younger and one more recent. Then a content creator — perhaps a doctor or an aesthetician, sometimes wearing scrubs — will walk me through what cosmetic procedures they think the actress has had. (It’s much rarer that men get this kind of analysis.)
The tone of these posts is usually complimentary. The TikTok or YouTube creator raves about how wonderful the actress looks, all the while describing how she has supposedly had:
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Botox
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a temporal brow lift
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an upper blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery)
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rhinoplasty
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a mid-face lift
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and lip filler
It’s all guesswork, but these creators speak with a level of authority, supporting their arguments with visuals and pointing out the areas that they assume have been altered.
It’s a confounding and oddly fascinating social media trend that finds medical professionals and amateurs alike trying to do detective work on celebrity faces.
Emma Stone has become a frequent target for these shameless sleuths. Margot Robbie, Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway are too. And while much of the material comes from plastic surgeons or aesthetics professionals who are essentially advertising their services, these posts also function as a form of entertainment, in part because they recruit the audience in their investigations. Fans will ask for videos on specific celebs in the comments section. The posts essentially ask you to play along in a game of “spot the difference” — with actual human beings as the puzzle.
They also claim to offer a glimpse into a world where, with a lot of money and access, you can shift your looks in small but impactful ways. There’s an element of taboo-breaking, openly discussing what most stars would like to keep quiet. And inadvertently these creators chronicle how beauty standards and trends change in a relatively short time as stars manage their image and grow into their careers. Slim is now in, with fuller features like round, plump cheeks replaced by hollow ones achieved through buccal fat removal.
But these internet commentaries often ignore other reasons that faces might alter over the years, like aging, pregnancy or even makeup. (Good contouring can go a long way.) They pick before-and-after photos that support their arguments rather than ones that might complicate it. As Sydney Sweeney said in an interview with Allure while noting that she had never had work done: “You cannot compare a photo of me from when I was 12 to a photo of me at 26 with professional makeup and lighting.”
Of course, talking about whether an actress has had injectables or plastic surgery is part of a long tradition of judging women’s looks. In the days before Instagram and TikTok this was typically relegated to the pages of tabloids and gossip rags, where stars were criticized for weight gain and visible cellulite. Renée Zellweger’s return as Bridget Jones in 2016 was marred by accusations that she no longer looked like Bridget Jones because of her supposed “work.” She denied having any procedures done.
At the same time, it seemed obvious that some stars had altered their faces so much that their careers were affected. In the early 2000s, the nipping and tucking was so noticeable that the Times film critic Manohla Dargis wrote, “Our screens are crowded with freakishly plumped lips and breasts so round they look drawn by protractor.” In an industry reluctant to allow them to age gracefully into older roles, many simply disappeared from our screens.
These days there are more subtle ways, like Botox, to keep from sagging, and, in some cases, less of a stigma around the idea of submitting to the needle or going under the knife. Kris and Kylie Jenner, mother and daughter, have proudly touted their procedures, with Kylie even sharing the details of her breast augmentation in a TikTok comment.
And those who have made careers of transforming into characters are increasingly honest. Denise Richards allowed Allure to publish the before and after pictures of her recent facelift. In an interview with The New Yorker, Lawrence explained that she didn’t want fillers because they show on camera but does get Botox with the recognition that she has to use her forehead in her performances. Kate Hudson told The New York Times she had abstained from Botox to play a Wisconsin cover band singer in “Song Sung Blue,” a role that earned her an Oscar nomination.
It seems telling that the social media posts analyzing faces rarely focus on the women in their primary job: acting. And that’s perhaps because looking at them without red carpet glam might distract from the narrative the content creators are pushing. It’s hard to argue that Lawrence looks pristine as a new mother experiencing a psychotic break in “Die My Love.” Same with Stone in her Oscar-nominated turn as a kidnapped chief executive in “Bugonia,” her head shaved and her skin slathered in cream.
At the same time, these videos may well change the way we observe faces and, therefore, the way we watch movies. They’ve introduced terms like blepharoplasty — reduced to a cutesy “bleph” — into the lexicon. They’ve asked everyday people to play gotcha while intimate choices are turned into fodder for the endless churn of scrollable media. They are insidiously training our eyes to hunt for discrepancies, some of which very well may be from cosmetic procedures and some of which may just be from the ways in which time shapes a body.
As for the women themselves, it locks them into the same unwinnable position they have always been in: trying to survive in an industry that still values youth and beauty but also side-eyes anything that isn’t ostensibly natural. Whether they try to be as discreet as possible or own up to the changes, they’ll still be the subject of speculation and gossip.
After the Oscars, Anne Hathaway posted a video showing how her hairstylist made two tiny, discreet braids on each side of her face near her temples and pulled them back, achieving an effect not that dissimilar from a facelift. “And you look a little bit more awake,” Hathaway says with a smile. Is that enough to silence the armchair critics who have made her face one of their targets? Probably not.
The post When Stars’ Plastic Surgery Is Played for Your Entertainment appeared first on New York Times.
