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O<\/span>nce upon a time in Hollywood, if you were an actor preparing to walk the red carpet at the Academy Awards, you might have been fasting to fit into your outfit. You definitely had access to the best hair and makeup artists, and designers and jewellers lent you thousands of dollars worth of incredible products. Maybe you even had a subtle bit of plastic surgery. You looked great!<\/p>\n For a long time Hollywood operated a fairly coherent beauty ideal that, however unattainable, was at least legible.<\/p>\n Beautiful meant healthy, glowing, symmetrical, and slim but not gaunt.<\/p>\n The stars on the red carpet mostly looked like the most optimised version of themselves, which is to say they looked like very beautiful and polished versions of the rest of us.<\/p>\n But the look coming out of Hollywood now is not universally aspired to, in fact there is significant public ambivalence and even rejection of it.<\/p>\n Before, people may have looked at celebrities and felt inadequate because they didn\u2019t look as good, but now it seems a significant portion of the public looks at celebrities and feels something closer to concern, or alienation. The comment sections on images of dramatically altered celebrities are not full of aspiration; they are full of \u201cshe looks sick\u201d, \u201che looked so much better before\u201d and \u201cthis is sad.\u201d<\/p>\n This awards season there\u2019s been a cluster of stars whose red carpet or fashion week appearances have led to concern, not admiration. These are actors who suddenly look either severely underweight and unwell, or those who have been overly cosmetically enhanced \u2013 or both.<\/p>\n The most dramatic recent example is Jim Carrey, who looked so altered that people thought the person on the podium at the 2026 C\u00e9sar awards was a body double<\/a>. The 64-year-old\u2019s eyes were wide, his cheeks plumped and defined, his skin strangely smooth. Even his eye colour appeared to have been altered.<\/p>\n So intense was the speculation that his representatives had to verify in the media that it was him and that he had worked on his speech in French for months. The speculation arose, at least in part, because people thought someone like Carrey, whose animated face is part of his appeal, would not choose to freeze his features with surgery.<\/p>\n There are two converging phenomena that are producing a new aesthetic in Hollywood.<\/p>\n The first is GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro<\/a>, which have produced rapid and significant weight loss across Hollywood in a very short period. You can see it in the Ozempic face phenomenon<\/a>, when rapid fat loss produces volume loss in the face that then can appear gaunt and aged.<\/p>\n The second is the acceleration of cosmetic procedures that are gaining in popularity \u2013 filler, brow lifts, buccal fat removal (the surgical removal of the fat pads in the cheeks, which produces a very sharp, hollow-cheeked look), lip enhancements and rhinoplasty.<\/p>\n Buccal fat removal in particular, combined with Ozempic-related fat loss, is producing faces that look almost skeletal on screen. On the red carpet you see it in dramatically hollowed cheekbones, visible collarbones and very thin arms.<\/p>\n The result of both surgery and GLP-1s together is a specific aesthetic that looks slightly uncanny and unnatural; faces that are clearly worked on and bodies that are dramatically thin. The overall effect is unsettling and strange \u2013 as if the humans have been replaced by smooth replicas.<\/p>\n For the movies themselves, the new aesthetic presents a problem.<\/p>\n Actors are meant to reflect life back at us. And that means to a certain extent they need to look like us \u2013 just better looking versions.<\/p>\n Ethan Hawke, who is nominated for an Oscar for best actor, has allowed himself to age naturally, and like many men his age (55) his face is crossed with lines. In Blue Moon he plays a man who is washed up and consumed with jealousy at others\u2019 success. Could he have done that successfully if his face couldn\u2019t move or he was stuffed with filler? I suspect it would have been way too distracting for the audience, and taken them out of the story.<\/p>\n