Pillow-face epidemic

Which celebs have plumped for a surgery-free facelift - and who just looks like they have?

Cameron Diaz, the blonde surfer babe with the effortless beauty, suddenly looks downright weird. 

Face puffed up, cheeks resembling those of an over-inflated chipmunk, eyes shrunk to tiny slits ... she has joined what can only be described as the Pillow Face Club.

Sharon Osbourne, pictured last week, is another member. There she is looking as smooth and as unlined as a baby’s bottom and, for someone who has just turned 58, that looks plain odd.

Rejuvenated: Actress Cameron Diaz and Priscilla Presley (right) have recently been pictured with plump, smooth faces

Then there’s Kylie, Priscilla Presley, Daryl Hannah, Nicole Kidman and Linda Evans — all beautiful women who now look rejuvenated. How do they do it — diet and exercise?

They all sport the same youthful, plasticised look. But apart from Sharon Osbourne and Priscilla Presley, none admits to using fillers.

But Sharon, for example, must have a huge entourage surrounding her — why doesn’t one of them tell her to stop tampering? 

Why doesn’t her personal assistant tell her she has gone too far? It’s as if everyone is either too scared to say: ‘Stop plumping yourself up, you look hideous.’ Or, even more worryingly, they think it looks great. 

How do they do it? Sharon Osbourne (left) and actress Daryl Hannah sport the same youthful, ­plasticised look

We seem to have got to a stage where a desperation to appear to be young, regardless of how terrible it makes someone look, is more desirable than looking old. And now, ‘old’ can mean as young as 25. 

I’ve met women in their 20s in the UK who are having Botox for their frown lines. It’s very scary.

FILL OF APPROVAL

There are 147 injectable fillers available in the UK, but only seven have the approval of the U.S. Food And Drug Administration

It makes me wonder what they see in the mirror? They obviously do not, like the rest of us, see someone who looks as plastic and as expression-free as a child’s doll. 

They must see youth and beauty, the unobtainable desire that has somehow become attainable for those over 40. I asked psychotherapist Diana Parkinson to help explain what could be going on in their heads. 

‘Dysmorphia [Body Dysmorphic Disorder] is when the individual simply doesn’t see beauty in their face any more,’ she says. 

‘They simply see lines or flaws which need to be got rid of, and they can no longer see how ridiculous they are making themselves appear with all the surgery. 

What they see in the mirror isn’t what you or I see; they simply see the need to appear younger We look at Hollywood stars’ faces and think it’s normal . . . it’s anything but
and younger with more Botox and fillers. In Hollywood, all these stars are surrounded by their fellow actors, most of whom are surgically enhanced. 

Beautiful women: Youthful looking actresses Nicole Kidman (left) and Catherine Zeta-Jones

‘Scarily, if all we see are plumped-up, line-free, wide-eyed and thick-lipped faces, then we can start to see this as normal, and our own, natural face will seem strange in comparison, which can then lead to dysmorphia. 

'Sufferers are likely to keep going back under the knife, for ever searching for perfection but never able to achieve it.’ 

It’s also an age thing, Diana explains: ‘Around the age of 40, when a woman is approaching her fertility cut-off point, she feels an intense pressure to try to recapture the look of a woman who is still fertile and, therefore, youthful. 

‘Plumped-up cheeks, big eyes, smooth skin — they’re all signals of fertility. And so, with younger actors and singers arriving on the scene all the time, these older women feel they must do something to keep looking young in order to keep working. 

'It’s very sad they are so insecure and we should feel sorry for them, not copy them.’

In the past, it was all about the facelift. Those in the know — and those who had the money — went ‘under the knife’. 

Top Hollywood plastic surgeons, who could take years off you if you could pay, made a fortune. Of course going under the knife had its drawbacks, but at least women kept a semblance of their own looks.

But then the beauty industry moved on. Now it’s all about fillers and Botox and various other treatments which essentially involve pumping various solutions, from fat deposits to fillers, under the skin of the face so that it plumps out. 

Importance placed on youth: Stars in their forties and fifties like Kylie Minogue (left) and Madonna are under a large amount of pressure to keep looking young

Lines are eradicated. The face becomes increasingly larger and then, somehow, women such as Sharon Osbourne and her ilk look at least 20 years younger.
Only they don’t. 

The major problem is that it is so obvious when someone has had work that extensive. In Los Angeles, every face might mysteriously be able to retain the lustre of that of a 25-year-old, but in the UK, we are just not used to seeing faces that are made to look expressionless and almost alien. 

When I look at images of women who have had work done, they look as if they are avatars of themselves — versions that have had all life and emotion sucked out of them and have, instead, been replaced with waxwork dummies. 

I would be loathe to hold a lighted flame near some of Hollywood’s leading women’s faces in case they melted.

But the pursuit of youth is nothing new. Many years ago, when I went to interview Cher, I asked her why she had indulged in so much plastic surgery. She was draped on a sofa, in the half light, yet even then it was obvious her face was not her own. There was barely a line on it. 

She looked as though she had been mummified. And yet, despite the fact she could barely move her mouth, she tried to explain why she had undergone such radical steps. 

FACE FACTS

Almost 40 per cent of surgeons saw one to three patients over the past year experiencing complications with permanent facial fillers 

‘In this industry, you can’t get a job unless you look young,’ she said. 

‘No one is interested in women growing older. There are no parts for us. We go from being a love interest to a granny and there is nothing in between.’

In many ways, I can sympathise. There is massive pressure on women — especially famous women — to continue to look as young as possible these days. 

Diana Parkinson confirms this. ‘For stars like Cameron, Madonna and Kylie, that pressure is even more intense because not only are they in the public eye, being scrutinised for every ounce of weight they put on or every pimple they have, but they also work in an industry where so much importance is placed on youth.’

There are also endless practitioners willing to find their clients a procedure to satisfy every whim. Cosmetic surgeons working in Los Angeles report that patients specifically ask for this excessive amount of padding in their faces.

Dr William Binder, a facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon based in Beverly Hills, California, blames a large percentage of ‘pillow-face’ cases on surgeons being too scared to say ‘no’ to high-profile clients.

‘With some patients, surgery and fillers become an obsession,’ he says. ‘But then there is an obligation on the part of the surgeon to say: “No — no more.” It is up to the surgeon to use his best judgment. Sometimes the patient is not the best critic when it comes to how much they should get.

‘A young surgeon who hasn’t yet learned the mastery of saying no to the patient, and is afraid of losing that patient to competition down the street, is more likely to pander to their demands. It’s not because of greed and it’s not a case of wanting to do too much. It’s fear of saying no.’ 

Even us mere mortals are not immune. Every time I go to the dentist or the beauty salon to get my waxing done or even the gym, there are leaflets describing all the ways 

I can look more youthful if I would just pay a visit to whatever clinic or beautician. 

The word ‘naturally’ always comes into it, as in ‘look good naturally’. 

I asked my friend Anna about this. She is a nurse who also does some cosmetic surgery procedures, Restylane and Juvederm, for her clients. 

She told me that what she offers is for women to look as if they have just got back from holiday. ‘I do a bit of this and that,’ she told me, lifting the skin on my face up and back so that ten years evaporated off my features. 

‘Once women pass the age of 40, the elasticity and firmness in the skin starts to massively decline. I offer to help put that “youthful” look back through a system of injections that help plump the face. I am careful, though. No one wants a face that is blown up like a balloon.’

Yet, surely, the older a woman gets the more plumping up she needs. ‘Not if she is to grow old gracefully,’ said Anna. 

Another friend of mine, a female family GP, told me that in the resolutely middle-class part of the UK in which she works, the most persistent patients she sees are well-off women who are 40-plus. 

Had her fill: Former Dynasty star Linda Evans

‘They have married the big rich alpha male who fell in love with them because they were pretty, and now they are paranoid about the loss of their looks,’ she says. 

She told me they come in worrying about every blemish, every wrinkle, every sun spot. 

‘In the end, a lot of them go and get work done.’

I asked her if that seemed to make them happier. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘They have one thing done and it escalates.’

Maybe this is the problem. Let’s say you are a celebrity and you live in Hollywood. Everyone in Hollywood has had work done, and not just on their faces. 

You are surrounded by youth and beauty. Los Angeles is a city that worships the young. To fit in, to be considered for jobs, to keep your man, to earn money, you need to look younger the older you get. This is almost impossible to ignore. 

Even the luminescent Julie Christie resorted to having a facelift when she was living in LA, and she is possibly the most beautiful woman alive. She was not, however, immune to the pressures.

The problem is, once you get a bit of filler maybe to get rid of those wrinkles that run from your nose to your mouth, then you have a bit of Botox, then you plump your lips up, have a quick eye lift… it just goes on and on in little dribs and drabs. 

It’s a tuck here and a needle there, but once you pile procedure upon procedure, is a face that looks so oddly young, so fake, so plastic, so Thunderbird-like, that everybody knows you’ve overdone it. It’s a fine line.

But to the person who is having endless bits and pieces done, the process probably seems gradual. When they look in the mirror, they see something that pleases them. It’s the rest of us that reel back in horror.

Diana Parkinson believes that part of the reason why Osbourne and her fellow ‘pillow faces’ can’t see how strange they look is because our own perceptions of how we should look have changed. 

‘Forty years ago, the public would be freaked out by some of the faces we see on Hollywood stars today. Now, although we in the UK notice these stars have had work done, we’re becoming more accustomed to it, which is very worrying. I imagine that living there, you’d feel it was completely normal.

‘These images are already affecting how we perceive others. Research shows that young boys today who have been exposed to images of surgically enhanced models actually prefer silicon breasts to natural ones. Who knows what we’ll consider normal in ten or 20 years?’

What seems most tragic to me is how messed up society has become. The pursuit of everlasting youth for women means that more and more of us are distorting our looks, even destroying what we have because of the pressure we are under to create some sort of myth about ourselves. 

What has happened to the natural beauty that comes with ageing? We are increasingly turning ourselves into freaks, convincing ourselves we will enjoy a better life if we look younger. 

It is not true. I think, deep down, most of us know this, but how are we going to stop someone who thinks a syringe of something unknown pumped into their face will bring happiness?