Does This Make Me Look Operated?

What do Sharon Osbourne (56), Vanessa Williams (45), Jennie Garth (36), Daisy Fuentes (42), Brooke Shields (43), Simon Crowell (49), David Hasselhof (56), Linda Evangelista (43), Janice Dickinson (53), Lisa Rinna (45), Lori Loughlin (44), and Courtney Cox (44) all have in common?

Fewer wrinkles!

It's not a coincidence that there has been a slew of Botox "confessions" from Hollywood celebrities in the last few months. It coincides with Allergan's (the manufacturer of Botox® Cosmetic aka Botulinum Toxin Type A) marketing push launched in 2007 and formatted as a hybrid public service/infomercial/giveaway featuring well-known personalities.
Olympians Mark Spitz (58) and Nadia Comaneci (47) both gave lecture tours on “Your Personal Best” this fall. Virginia Madsen (44) hawked Botox with her mother in "Freedom of Expression."

By her own admission, Madsen got the job by a slip of the tongue in an interview shortly after the surprise success of her Oscar-nominated film role in Sideways (2004).

But it is really just stating the obvious: Aging Hollywood faces have help from knives and needles.

Short of the kind of admissions currently being featured in magazines, how do you know who's telling the whole truth?

It's all in the ears.

Rhytidectomies do the heavy lifting and offer the most clues. In a traditional facelift, an incision is made in front of the ear extending up into the hairline and down around the bottom of the ear and then up behind it, usually ending in the hairline. (For an excellent pictorial tutorial of the actual surgery, go here.)

Shall we play I Spy? I spy with my little eye....operated auricles.

A pixied earlobe is the distorted result when the reattached lobule is pulled down and forward onto the cheek. A fine example is Micky Rourke's (56) left ear; both are shown. A competent facial plastic surgeon will preserve the shape of the lobe you with which you were born. Otherwise, a big earring is the answer.

Poor scar placement and poor incision planning can be covered up with hairstyling– less so if you are David Gest (55). Over time, John Cleese's (69) aging facelift has relaxed into something appearing fairly natural, but his misplaced post-auricular scar in probably still very visible. (Check out the big kiss scene in Fierce Creatures, 1997).

The pre- and post-auricular skin of the ear is specialized: it is thin and nonhair-bearing. In some (especially men) the facial skin does not match identically with the ear skin. Removing this patch of pliable, hairless skin can have unnatural results....like shaving your ear.

Perhaps more subtle is temporal hair loss or the sacrifice of the tuft of hair at the upper junction of the ear and face. As with Sophia Loren's (74) right ear, it can give a man or woman the appearance of wearing a wig.

The incision can go behind the tragus, that little cartilaginous bump in front of the ear hole, or in front of it. Female stars like Joan Rivers (75) usually opted for behind, in order to camouflage the scar. Poorly handled, the natural definition/indentation in that area is lost, blunting of the facial-ear junction.

Sometimes the tragus itself is distorted and pulled forward by the tension of the lift and/or the thickness of the redraped skin (this settles out over time as it has for Madonna, 50).

And whose operated ears do I Spy here?




After a traditional facelift, some of these stars may appear wonderful in photos, but as soon as they try to move their faces they look a bit Frankenface. The old-school operated look is something smooth and taut, but not young. The new look is all about volume, not subtraction. Volume is the very essence of facial youth and next-generation surgery is all about adding it.



New Feature FM107.1 on Demand - audio archive
http://www.fm1071.com/ondemand/

Did you miss hearing Anne flesh it all out with Kevyn Burger on-air? Use this link to find the FM107.1 audio archive of Knifestyles broadcasts by date (second hour). Step one: select the date shown on the blog posting; step two: click on Kevyn Burger; step three: click on second hour. Enjoy!

I Spy answers:

Christmas Cleavage

What festive cleavage are you wearing this holiday season? Next to finishing up the gift shopping, I'm sure the first thing on your mind is how to dress up your breasts. At the cocktail party I attended last weekend, I was accused of a Madame X look, a reference to John Singer Sargent's infamous 1884 portrait of the American-born Paris socialite, Judith Gautreau. Her arsenic white décolleté and scandalous slipped shoulder strap drove Sargent (and the painting) out of town.

Think times have changed? Last July, when Hillary Clinton displayed even a very modest amount of chest the blogosphere went wild.

Cleavage is simply the cleft created by the partial exposure of a woman's breasts in a low-cut neckline. Or, if you're a surgeon, it's the intermammary sulcus (fun people, aren't they?). So what gives it the power to shake the world, century after century? Context, context, context. That and men are irrational over it.

Breast cleavage has been a modern, clothed phenomenon; it didn't exist in the Garden of Eden. Any tight, well-structured bodice can lift the breasts upwards and inwards (that was the wonderful in Wonderbra – as opposed to Maidenform lift and separate promise).

Prior to the advent of implants, a large busted woman's breasts merged together under pressure; cleavage became a crevice. Think Bette Midler. A really well engineered bodice can cantilever the breasts in such a way that this is minimized. Think Isaac Mizrahi observations about Scarlett Johansson's Golden Globes dress.

But when it comes to breast implants, the width of the sulcus area (cleavage) is determined by the attachments of the skin to the peri-osteal tissue covering sternum (breast bone) and by the medial attachments of the pectoralis major muscle when implants are in the sub-muscular position.

If those natural attachments are lost a host of uncorrectable deformities distort the cleavage including synmastia, the "uniboob" deformity. This can result from over aggressive dissection towards the midline, particularly in a subglandular (over the muscle) placement. Very large implants, repeated over time can have similar results. Think Pamela Anderson.

Some women have very little fatty tissue overlying the sternum so there's nothing to soften the contour transition from breasts to sternum. This causes the space between the breasts to appear wide. Since the implants must be centered behind the nipples, it's very hard to camouflage, particularly with a subglandular placement. Think Victoria Beckham. (This is something she previously denied until court papers were released in 2005 proving she had undergone augmentation surgery; it's rumored she had revision surgery prior to touring this month. Looks like it to me.)

One woman has written a tome on doing it right. Elisabeth Squires, author of Boobs: A Guide to Your Girls, thinks even older women can attractively show off cleavage, as Helen Mirren (61) does at every awards show. But beware: "If a woman of a certain age squeezes her girls together, she'll get the wrinkled, crepelike look. That's not good." Mirren's plunging bodices carefully avoid that.

Now back to the festive part. Here we have our Christmas party Goofus and Gallant example. For the office holiday party, author Squires's advice is: "[i]f cleavage isn't in your job description, don't put it in." Sorry, Britney. But the adults-only cocktail party? You've got it, Paris. Shake their world: tasteful cleavage and heels are the way to go (but put on the other stocking, puh-leeze).

Be sure and tune in FM107.1 to hear an expanded exploration of celebratory cleavage with Colleen Kruse this Thursday at 10:00am CST, subbing in for Kevyn Burger.



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Where's My Emmy? 2007

Do you think the Emmys are more interesting if you are sitting there in person? Maybe if you had a frontal view? It does seem rather self-important. Or maybe it's all an elaborate joke: we're only pretending this is important!

So why are we listening to these actors thank people we've never heard of? Shouldn't it be in a heartfelt note on nice stationary? Is it good entertainment? We get lame jokes with wooden teleprompter delivery. These are actors, right? And they did rehearse...can't the presenters memorize 90 seconds of speech?! And the musical Jersey Boys lip-to-lip synced their way through "who loves yooooou, pretty baaaay-bee."

Oh dear. Well, let's get on with it. In a somewhat chronological fashion, here are style thoughts wielded with a knife.

Nearly everyone seemed a bit uncomfortable with the in-the-round set. You could almost imagine the whole 'backside' half of the audience was comprised of those life-size cutout photographs. Those were certainly the cheap seats where they stuck the crews with unrecognizable faces– hence the awkward about-face on camera when a winner thanked the little people.

So what about those fashions? Of course we picked out favorite dresses: the beautiful deep lavendar silk on Helen Mirren and the full, champagne number on Heroes star Hayden Panettiere. The gowns are flattering, timeless, unconventional for the times. Alright, Helen's hair was terrible. But her facelift is aging well, although the neck under the chin looks a tad pulled to me.

Whatever sartorial elegance the others were striving for was completely undone by wearers' graceless bearing. Why can't more of these women learn how to walk in a gown?!! They stagger side-to-side like they're off to a hoe-down. For heaven's sake, they're actresses! Oh, don't get me started. Katherine Heigl in her lovely hair and Zac Posen gown practically throws her skirt over her shoulder to hike up the stage steps without tripping. These are custom made couture gowns worth tens of thousands of dollars. Learn to walk in them like you own them.

Best dressed, overacting male nominee? Lost Terry O'Quinn (55) hands down. The fuschia shirt was a great standout look in the sea of b&w television. He really pulled it off, though I notice he's been a (upper) denture wearer for some time. You can see the bone reabsorption in the shortened maxilla and hear it in how he pronounces a few words. But he has a real (chubby) wife. I forgive him anything!

Ryan Seacrest may fake knowing fashion as he demonstrated by 'guessing' Eva Longoria's Lacroix shoes (about the same height as his own heels, hmmm...), but he doesn't wear it. Seacrest's shiny tux looked like he recycled a yard waste bag and rip-off tie strip is substituting for neckware. And who puts a necktie on a tux, anyway? Over half the male audience, I guess. Well, it is the Emmys.

And didn't it seem absurd for Seacrest not to mention Sally Field's two Oscar wins or her Emmy for Sybil as evidence of her talent? Why bring up Gidget and The Flying Nun?

"At the heart of Nora Walker, she is a mother, so surely this belongs to all the mothers of the world. May they be seen, may their work be valued. . . And to especially the mothers who stand with an open heart and wait, wait for their children to come home, from danger, from harm's way and from war. I am proud to be one of those women," Sally Field said (she plays a character whose youngest son was deployed at the end of the show's last season). "And let's face it: If the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamn war in the first place!"

Do you think Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network censored Sally Field for her vocabulary or the content of her political statement? Field's (60) facelift has aged well, although in 2005 she has pledged with Jane Fonda (69) to have no more plastic surgery going forward.

It seemed that the best extemporanous speeches were those given by film actors. Compare Robert Duval's sincerity or Helen Mirren's poise and polish with the television actors babblings and certain conlusions jump to mind.

It didn't win, but the hilarious nomination of Real Time with Bill Mahr for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series made hometown Minnesotans proud. Our MSP airport mensroom makes us a 'fly-in' state now! Jon Stewart won anyway, though I could swear he had makeup covering a cold sore. Nope, I'm wrong: just a funny upper lip.

Alec Baldwin obviously decided that with global warming and fall temperatures in the 80s we can wear white after Labor Day. I wonder if they sat him next to Al Gore? And wasn't it gratifying to have our chubby, national father-figure inspire the longest standing ovation of the evening?

Lewis Black should not have had Botox placed in his forehead. He's a raging comedian with pacing issues, he needs his full facial expressions! Watch the lateral side of his brows shoot up while the medial corrugators stay depressed and sprung apart. His fashion choice is a compelling statement why men with fat necks should not wear spread collars– but the Windsor knot on his tie was in place for once.

And my last thought? Actually a plea, really. Tell me, please, what did director Alan Taylor say to his wife Nickie and in what language??


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