London - With her peaches and cream complexion and rosebud lips, Catherine Zeta-Jones has long been regarded as the epitome of beauty.
Since she rose to fame more than 20 years ago in the British TV series The Darling Buds Of May, she has starred in as many beauty advertisements as she has films, with women seeking to emulate her style.
But appearing at the Actors Fund Annual Gala in New York recently, she was sporting a startlingly different look.
Her figure was as curvaceous as ever, but her face was almost unrecognisable.
She had that eerily immobile, wrinkle-free forehead that makes so many Hollywood stars look like fashion store mannequins.
Her cheeks sat like ping-pong balls under stretched, lifeless skin. But the most alarming aspect of her look was her lips - taut yet bulbous, with ends that appeared to be dragged up into a sinister slash, last seen when Jack Nicholson played the Joker in the 1989 movie Batman.
Not that Catherine Zeta-Jones is the only celebrity to be transformed. It seems this ‘Joker face’ has become the latest signature style of Hollywood A-listers.
The wind tunnel look - caused by surgery to remove lines around the eyes by pulling back the skin - has been replaced by slightly crazed, knife-edged smiles that can be produced by a combination of too much filler, Botox and ill-judged surgery on the lips.
“The Joker faces we see can be evidence of too much plastic surgery,” says Dr Aamer Khan, of the Harley Street Skin Clinic.
The distinctive “smile” can occur when the corners of the top lip are pulled up by muscles in the cheeks, while the rest of the lip remains static. This is because if a top lip has been injected with filler, it can’t move naturally. Therefore, the movement at the corners of the mouth is much more pronounced.
Added to this is the effect created by plumped-out pillow cheeks, which again, cannot move naturally, and so accentuate the grimace.
“The reasons for the rise of this look are myriad, from pressure to look a certain way in Hollywood to the fact that a lot of stars have a form of secondary dysmorphia, where they have played with their image so much they have lost a sense of what they really look like,” says Dr Khan.
“But if one doctor tells them not to have more work, they have the money to go elsewhere and pay for a botched job. It’s clear many of them have become addicted to looking younger - whatever the cost.”
And when you end up looking like Jack Nicholson at his most devilish, that’s a pretty high price to pay . . .
Daily Mail