When plastic is not fantastic

What marvels the 21st century has wrought: we have a Baron of Botox, lunchtime cosmetic procedures, and plastic surgeons on speed dial.

Now that non-surgical miracles are at our disposal, you would think that the days of women looking like they were trapped in a wind tunnel are over. But for every Michelle Pfeiffer (wow, who’s her doctor?) you have a Farrah Fawcett (yikes, who’s her butcher?); for every Gisele Bündchen (boobs: did she or didn’t she?), you have a Jocelyne Wildenstein (once known as the Cat Woman, she now looks like the Elephant Woman).

Hollywood, especially, is the premier testing ground for medicine’s latest — and not-so-greatest — formulas for youth. How to take the measure of a star’s insecurity? Count the number of inches she adds to her bra size or shaves off her nose. Though most of us are aware by now that Tinseltown is Vanity Central (they have to look good both on 30-foot screens and in tabloid photographs, don’t you know) and we, in turn, aspire to look as good as they do, what exactly drives the treadmill in the pursuit of perfect youth and beauty?

First, there’s the “crippling inadequacy” excuse. Rhinoplasties, a.k.a. nose jobs, and breast augmentation, a.k.a. boob jobs, fall under this category. Here, the main inadequacy is size, as in “my knockers aren’t big enough to poke a man’s eye out,” or “my nose is only slightly less wide than the Autobahn.”

Not surprisingly, the demand for breast implants is only matched by the demand for ski-slope noses. In Hollywood, the list of those who’ve had their schnozzes reduced is so long it’s like Clueless, only with greater star power. There’s Jennifer Aniston, whose surgery was so hyped you expected her to emerge looking like Angeline Jolie. But when the “before and after” pictures came out, the difference was so negligible that voyeurs focused once again on her body, her hair, and how she could have let someone like Brad slip through her fingers.

Three other Jennifers are said to have had their noses altered: Jennifer Grey, Jennifer Lopez and Jennifer Connelly. Jennifer Grey is the tragic example here, the Dirty Dancing starlet who halted her meteoric rise when she had a nose job and came out so unrecognizable she couldn’t even cash in on her own fame. Nowadays, she is seldom heard from except as a cautionary tale about botched nose jobs.

J. Lo and J. Con were luckier in their choice of plastic surgeons. If you doubt me about J. Lo, catch one of her early movies, like Blood and Wine or Jack, where her schnozz was almost as prominent as her famous derriere. By U-Turn a couple years later, she was sporting a cuter, sleeker, less noticeably bumpy nose.

Jennifer Connelly has lost so much weight since her Labyrinth debut there’s actually very little evidence she’s had work done. Where her ample pulchritude was on display in teen flicks like Career Opportunities, she’s now a wisp of her former self as muse to Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere. Has she had breast reduction and a rhinoplasty, as has been rumored, or has she just lost all her baby fat? My husband, an avid J. Con watcher, thinks it’s the latter.

The nose knows: other stars who’ve whittled their Karl Maldens are Halle Berry, Gwyneth Paltrow, Beyoncé and Ashlee Simpson. Angelina Jolie, who ironically begat the collagen-lip boom, underwent the makeover of a lifetime when she had her rhinoplasty. A rough-featured tomboy in Hackers, she grew her hair and had her nose thinned to play supermodel Gia Carangi two years later. Though accused of also having had a boob job and lip injections to further plump her pout, pictures bear out that aside from trimming her beak, Angie is all Angie and her current, Lara Croft-ian persona is the result of major baby-fat loss.

Then there’s the boob brigade. Pamela Anderson is perhaps the most famous example of how boosting your cup size can boost your career, such as hers is, as well as your hotness quotient with extremely shallow men. Fellow believers in the powers of jaw-dropping jugs are Carmen Electra, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Tori Spelling (though she repeatedly denies it), Lindsay Lohan, and Beyoncé (again).

Some stars don’t find just one body part inadequate, they’re so unhappy with what God gave them they have to have a complete overhaul. The poster boy for this category has to be Michael Jackson, who’s so surgerized everyone expects him to melt under direct sunlight. In fairness to Michael, he had to bleach himself white because he suffers from vitiligo, a condition in which smooth white patches appear on the skin due to a loss of pigment-producing cells. But as for his hankering to look like Diana Ross, well, that’s another story.

Others who’ve undergone complete revamps are Courtney Love and Sharon Osbourne. Love, who admittedly was no great beauty to start with, at least had a killer body pre-surgery. After much nipping and tucking, her face has taken a turn for the worse, and her rack is starting to look uneven. Courtney, quit while you’re ahead! (See below: Tara Reid and Farrah Fawcett)

Mrs. Ozzy Osbourne, on the other hand, started feeling dowdy after viewing herself too many times on reality TV. So for her birthday she gifted herself with a completely new look: refreshed, more buxom, total wow. Ozzy will never have to look sideways at another bird again.

Who can’t empathize with stars that want to ensure career longevity by staving off old age for as long as possible? Hence you have Joan Rivers, whose face is as tight as some of the dresses on her red-carpet victims; Melanie Griffith, who doesn’t have much of a career right now but is still hanging on to Antonio Banderas; and Kenny Rogers, who shocked most of the music-loving, chicken-eating world with his drastically altered appearance on American Idol. (Oh, my God, they’ve changed Kenny!)

Sure, we can identify with those who want to stay young-looking within reason, but what about celebrities who are still young, in their prime, and are already having surgery “just because”? Case in point, Nicole Kidman. Kidman was the statuesque Australian beauty who was so hot she snared Tom Cruise, and so talented she won an Oscar before he ever could. And yet, after every public sighting, Kidman incites heated debate about “What’s she done to her face now?” Word is that Nicole has had a brow lift, her nose done, collagen lip injections, and so much Botox that her forehead’s as scary-smooth as Marcia Cross’s in Desperate Housewives. Fans who remember her from her Flirting days find it a crying shame that Nicole’s so insecure/such a control freak she had to tamper with her naturally lovely face.

Other “why did she do it?” examples are Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas and Victoria Beckham. In the case of Posh Spice, being married to someone like David Beckham would be reason enough to want to always look perfect, but for both Fergie and Nicole, the “before” photos are much preferable to the “afters.”

Let’s not forget the legions suffering from Angelina Jolie Syndrome: Jessica Simpson, Meg Ryan, Marg Helgenberger, and Kidman’s best friend Naomi Watts are but a few. They think a few shots of collagen will save them from thin-lip-dom and give them the bee-stung pout they so crave but, to the keen eyes of tab readers, few procedures are as obvious as a badly done lip job. Britney Spears, anyone?

The final category is unexpected, in that it advocates having more plastic surgery, not less. These are the already botched surgeries, the kind that websites like “awfulplasticsurgery.com” and “horrorplasticsurgery.com” were made for. While medical books will probably have Jocelyne Wildenstein’s face (and I use the term loosely here) illustrating the annals of surgery gone wrong, Hollywood’s walking cautionary tales include Farrah Fawcett and party girl Tara Reid. Only her doctor knows for sure how many face-lifts she’s had, but the former Charlie’s Angel’s current look is so hellishly bad that instead of cutting her losses, she should run to Sharon Osbourne’s doctor. Reid has already had corrective surgery for a botched boob job that left her nipples deformed and her stomach bulging due to a hernia. She had to go under the knife again to smooth it out — how attractive is that?

Anyway, the moral of the story, if there is one, is: if aging gracefully is anathema to you, take advantage of the new advances in non-invasive technology. And if you can’t live with that big nose, a few ganders at these photos might convince you to cherish what nature gave you.