Do you recognize this woman?  (Looks a bit like Nicolette Sheridan or Uma Thurman, no?)  She’s a composite of Angelina Jolie (straight, narrow nose and full lips), Madonna (almond, wide-set eyes and plumped cheeks), Michelle Pfeiffer (smooth brow and high forehead) and Demi Moore (angular jawline), and she is emblematic of The New Face, as identified by New York Magazine.  In an article titled “How Plastic Surgery Can Give An Older Woman the Face of a Baby,” the old adage that, after a certain age, it’s either your butt or your face, is turned on its ear: guess what?  You can be scary skinny and unhealthily obsessed with keeping your body slim through punishing workouts and increase facial volume to avoid the Skeletor face: plumpers are the name of the game! 

Photo from NYMag.com

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Thread-lifts jumped in popularity a few years back when Oprah Winfrey promoted them on her show (just like her name-check of thermage sent thousands of women running to the dermatologist to waste their money).  Recently, however, thread-lifts procedures have been waning as patients and doctors are simultaneously beginning to realize that they often can’t support the weight of the skin and are only proving to be temporary fixes.  When I read this post from my docs, I have to admit I was in the dark as to what the hell thread-lifts exactly are; I did a little research, and was pretty grossed out: um, they are basically putting barbed wires under your skin!  According to the Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery, one surgeon reported that, of the 75 patients he’d performed thread-lifts on, 30 had experienced complications, and 14 of those were treated to the horror show of the barbed thread actually popping out from under their skin.  In other news, I need to go pass out now. 

Readers and friends ask me all the time how to get rid of undereye circles, and I always have to disappoint them with the unsatisfactory answer: creams and serums might help a teeny bit, but not much, since the problem is often a hereditary pigmentation problem.  Thursday Styles devotes an entire article to it, explaining that excess pigmentation and dilated veins are the two main culprits, and bemoaning that—despite the 50 plus creams at Sephora devoted to the problem, not to mention the $1.8 billion spent in 2006 on banishing dark circles—few products are actually effective.  The article recommends products that contain plumping ingredients like AHAs, or vitamins C and K to thicken skin and lays out the unsexy truth that sometimes the dermatologist or (eek!) plastic surgeon is the best and only recourse.  Nobody really wants to hear it (”But, but, can’t I just spend money at Neiman’s???”  Nein), but for severe problems, fillers like Juvederm or Restylane and lasers to target pigmentation are often the only things that work. 

Ashlee Simpson-Wentz confirmed her pregnancy with Pete Wentz last week, rightfully waiting until after the first trimester had passed to deliver the news to all the rubberneckers out here in blogland.  While queueing for my lunch today, I did the unthinkable and flipped through a nearby Star magazine, noticing a piece about Ashlee’s supposed worry over passing her (still ridiculously good) genes to her baby.  It was a fluff little piece, unless most of the very serious journalism in Star, but it did get me thinking…if you’re vain enough to drastically alter your appearance in the first place (we can call a spade a spade, right?), it stands to reason that you must indeed have a mini freak-out worrying about your baby getting your “bad” old nose, or weak chin, or protruding ears, or generous thighs, whatever.  (Insert celebrity name and plastic procedure here!)  After all, with a little pain tolerance and a lot of money, you can easily create a magazine cover-ready face and body, and most patients re-adjust their self-image to fit their new looks after surgery, conveniently “forgetting” what they were born with.  So having a kid pop out with features from the old you must be quite an unpleasant reminder, no?

Out with the old…

In with the new…

Photo from People.com

In other news, Jessica Simpson has never looked better recently: healthy, freshly blond, and just all around pretty.  The bronzed goddess glow suits her!

Seeing as she’s the beauty director of Vogue UK, you might assume Alexandra Shulman to be an enthusiastic champion of various cosmetic procedures, but in this fascinating editorial in today’s Daily Mail, she claims to have never had a single bit of “work” done.  Women are getting Botox and facelifts and Restylane injections, she says, because we want to look younger…but the fact that we’re emphatically not getting any younger makes every tweak a more insistent form of denial.  It’s a wonderfully valid point…but can’t you take it even further and then cast the net of derision over the entire anti-aging products industry?  When you boil it to the core—which is ultimately a terror of aging—what’s the difference between Botox, eyelifts and the bimonthly purchase of peptide and antioxidant creams?

My favorite quote comes at the very end of the article: ‘We broke through the glass ceiling, and we broke the gender barrier, with a tremendous amount of effort, and now we all want to look like Atomic Kittens (a UK pop band),’ she said. ‘Where is the emancipation in that?‘