Fast-forward 60 years. The Hollywood studio system has collapsed, the old stars are gone, and yet plastic surgery still fascinates us. Writers and directors keep coalescing around the topic. The Substance, one of the biggest films of 2024, saw a middle-aged (and Oscar-nominated) Demi Moore get hooked on anti-ageing drugs, with disastrous consequences. The aforementioned The Beauty, which fittingly stars real-life supermodel Bella Hadid, sets law enforcement on the trail of an STD whose victims become mysteriously attractive.
Look up any modern A-lister online and you can find a detailed rundown of the procedures they have undergone: baby Botox, rhinoplasty, boob jobs. It’s currently fashionable to look emaciated, just as it was in the interwar period and in the “heroin chic” 1990s. Millions worldwide are taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including celebrities with huge platforms, such as Oprah Winfrey and comedian Amy Schumer. The world is getting skinnier.
Actresses and singers of all stripes keep appearing on red carpets with mysteriously sunken faces, rumoured to be the result of increasingly popular “buccal fat removal” procedures – which involves getting the fat sucked from the inside of your cheeks. Notable cases are rumoured to include Hadid, Miley Cyrus, and Wednesday star Jenna Ortega, who, at 23, is young enough to have baby fat still.
In the early 1930s, actresses such as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford achieved a near-identical effect at the dentist by having their molars removed to define their cheekbones better. Today’s procedure is similarly irreversible – buccal fat cannot grow back once removed, and when trends inevitably shift again, unhappy patients will need to compensate with regular, expensive injections of facial filler.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.telegraph.co.uk ’
