Once upon a time in Hollywood, if you were an actor preparing to walk the red carpet at the Academy Awards, you might have been fasting to fit into your outfit. You definitely had access to the best hair and makeup artists, and designers and jewellers lent you thousands of dollars worth of incredible products. Maybe you even had a subtle bit of plastic surgery. You looked great!

For a long time Hollywood operated a fairly coherent beauty ideal that, however unattainable, was at least legible.

Beautiful meant healthy, glowing, symmetrical, and slim but not gaunt.

The stars on the red carpet mostly looked like the most optimised version of themselves, which is to say they looked like very beautiful and polished versions of the rest of us.

But the look coming out of Hollywood now is not universally aspired to, in fact there is significant public ambivalence and even rejection of it.

Before, people may have looked at celebrities and felt inadequate because they didn’t look as good, but now it seems a significant portion of the public looks at celebrities and feels something closer to concern, or alienation. The comment sections on images of dramatically altered celebrities are not full of aspiration; they are full of “she looks sick”, “he looked so much better before” and “this is sad.”

This awards season there’s been a cluster of stars whose red carpet or fashion week appearances have led to concern, not admiration. These are actors who suddenly look either severely........

© The Guardian