The New New Face

In the latest issue of NY Magazine, Jonathan Van Meter discusses the new new face (aka plumping, not pulling) of Hollywood's leading ladies.

Overall, the article is quite sharp and makes a few v.good points, but there are a couple of quotes from renowned dermatologist Patricia Wexler that leave me questioning how far we'll go for a shot at eternal youth:

“ [The previous new face is] what I call the Beetlejuice phenomenon,” she says when we meet. “You keep pulling and pulling, and your head gets smaller, and your body gets bigger as you age, and so you wind up with this little head on this big body. But we now know that you need volume to keep a face looking young. Volume means a face that goes out. And it’s all about the cheeks and the jawline.”

When I tell her that making the face bigger or “fatter” seems counterintuitive, she says, “I know, that’s why no one was doing it twenty years ago.” “How did you figure it out?” I ask. “Because I was doing lipo and I don’t like to throw anything away.”

...Wexler is a die-hard believer in the power of injectables. “If you are sunken-in and hollow under your eyes because you haven’t had an English muffin in three years, you are going to look bad. You need to have a certain amount of that juvenile plumpness to look young,” she says.

I think Patricia Wexler is a cosmetic genius (with a fabulous product collection to boot), but are we really getting to a place where we avoid carbs, suck-out the effects of any that slipped by, and then inject the remains into our face to look youthful and radiant?

Then again, perhaps we're just modernizing what it means to age gracefully. Maybe all those women we thought were doing so were simply ahead of the curve, being plumped-up on the Upper East Side while the masses looked to the face lift as their only option...

Comments

[Claire]

Here's my beauty tip for aging gracefully - eat well, sleep well, live well, love well (that includes loving yourself- self acceptance is key.) Oh, and wear sunscreen. Putting bits of your bum on your face to delay the inevitable is frankly, crazy.

[Katie Hallison]

Many procedures of cosmetic surgery had already been practiced now. And in time, there will be so many options to choose from! When my neighbor asked a surgeon on how to look younger, she told me that she was given many options like injecting botox, facial rejuvenations and plastic surgeries. Since it's her first time, she decided to have botox injections to revive her facial skin. It was successful! She looks ten years younger now, unlike before.