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.



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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:

Toss Those Tweezers! (Eyebrows)

Ah, the eyebrow. The window frame to the soul. They get plucked, penciled, and pierced; tinted, trimmed, and threaded; shaved, stenciled, and waxed. They must be important!

In fact, the eyebrow is the spokesperson for the face - particularly in women. Much of the time we have little control over the tiny muscles governing their spontaneous expression: arching in surprise, knitting together in concern, up and down in anger, irony, and joy. It's a large part of what makes the face, in both men and women, interesting.

From skinny to bushy, the brows tell of culture, fashion, and politics.

Robyn Cosio, author of The Eyebrow, argues that the story of the eyebrow's progress through the 20th century parallels the story of women's independence. The flapper era desexualized the newly liberated woman by taking away her hips, breasts, and eyebrows - penciling them back on thin and clueless through the 30s. Was the heavier, natural brow of the 40s and 50s a redefinition of femininity after the social upheaval of sex roles during the war years? The unkempt, even unruly, eyebrows of the 70s an encapsulation of the women's movement?

The eyebrow of the new millennium is large again. Ladies, toss those tweezers! A whole bevy of Eastern European fashion models— Daris, Natalia, Vlada, Eugenia, Sasha and Snejana are inspiring a return to the bold brow. Last Fall, the NYTimes profiled stylists who declared “[o]n both coasts, everybody wants a thicker brow that reminds you of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner.” Styles may cycle in and out of favor, but many stars have made their mark with a face anchored by a prominent brow and, often, little else. It's a big statement. Strong eyebrows make one look intelligent and empowered.

Nefertiti was a make-up queen when it came to her brows. She shaved them off and painted on those dramatic, elegant brows. Try to picture Audrey Hepburn without her brows, or Sophia Loren.

Bette Davis wouldn't have made it past her screen test if the cinematographer Karl Freund hadn't convinced the director that she had "lovely eyes" and would be suitable for The Bad Sister (1931).

Stars have completely changed their looks over the years by changing their eyebrows. Joan Crawford's incredibly thin blond brows of the 1920s evolved into her signature thick black brows of the 1950s. Look at how Madonna handles her eyebrows each time she reinvents her look.

Getting the right brow isn't easy. There's actually a catelogue of celebrity browshapes to help you analyze what features appeal to you. Round brow? Julia Roberts. Arched? Think Keira Knightley. Softly angled? Nicole Kidman. Curvy? Kirstie Alley. Flat brows? Brooke Shields.

Too much brow? A unibrow or monobrow, medically known as a synophrys, is fairly common in some ethnic groups. It's a sign of feminine beauty in Caucasus and Iran, where connected eyebrows are a sign of virginity and being unmarried. Salma Hayek has been quoted as saying she misses the days when she had one eyebrow because it would have come in handy for her role as Frida Kahlo, the legendary Mexican artist.

Less painful than tweezing or waxing, threading is a very trendy (and ancient) way of shaping the brow. Threading is widely used in India, the Middle East, China and Turkey on both men and women. (It is a Persian tradition to use threading to remove all of a bride's body hair before her wedding night in Iran.) Brad Pitt have been quoted in praise of eyebrow threading!

Doing without eyebrows is quite altering. In Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d-Urbervilles, the beautiful heroine cuts off her eyebrows to protect herself from the lust of men. It is an effective subterfuge. Charlize Theron bravely shaved her eyebrows to better portray the title role in Monster (2003).

Last month, da Vinci's iconic Mona Lisa was scanned using a high-definition camera. A 240-million pixel image using 13 light spectrums, including ultra-violet and infrared, reveals she probably once had eyelashes and eyebrows.

Putting them back on is possible. Permanent makeup will last a number of years, but eventually the tattooing fades, a bit like disappearing ink. It's said that in the 1700s, English women wore falsies made out of tiny pieces of mouse fur. Today salons specializing in brows enhance very sparse ones by gluing a tiny fiber onto each existing hair, a form of eyebrow extensions. There are also brow prosthetics — little toupees for the hair-impaired — in a multitude of shapes and shades. Surgeons offer hair transplant techniques involving tiny hair grafts.

Gravity & aging cause the forehead tissue to sag downward, dropping the eyebrows from their youthful position to a lower position above the eye. It's generally perceived as an aged appearance– or tired, sad, or mad.

Time for a lift! If Botox chemical fix doesn't do it anymore, then it's time for surgery. In a direct browlift the incision is immediately above the brow in a forehead crease– this raises each brow but not the entire forehead (Sylvester Stallone). A temporal lift places a wedge excision in the hair for a lateral pull. A coronal lift puts the incision behind the hairline, excising a wedge of scalp and hoisting up the entire forehead including the eyebrows (Elizabeth Taylor). The least invasive, most natural look involves an endoscopic lift of the brow by re-suspension of the forehead muscles under the brows.


Interested in this look? Eyebrow extensions can cost between $75 to $250 and takes 45 minutes to two hours for an effect that lasts two weeks. Brow reconstruction with hair transplants by a physician involves 150 to 200 grafts for a complete male eyebrow or 100 to 150 grafts for a complete female eyebrow at $4-10/graft. A facial plastic surgeon might charge $3,900 to $5,900 for an endoscopic browlift.


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