This week's Entertainment Weekly features a promising exposé on how plastic surgery is destroying Hollywood.

"Saving Face," by Allison Hope Weiner (full article for subscribers only), is precisely the sort of iconoclastic, screw the publicists let's-just-do-it piece we love to see in magazines. Finally, someone is telling the truth about all the frightening fembots and lifted leading men who make growing old gracefully on screen look as anachronistic as married couples with separate beds. (And the article's illustration by Joe Zeff will haunt our dreams.)

Unfortunately, EW plays it coy. In three pages, the only plastic surgery addict positively ID'd is... Cher. Yes, entertainment magazines live and die by access to stars, but publicists have short memories and is it the worst thing in the world if we never see another Meg Ryan (just to pull one name out of a hat) cover?

In EW's defense, Weiner does say at the outset that guessing who's had plastic surgery is:

"So common, in fact, it's become something of a tabloid standard, the who's-had-it headline screeching from the supermarket checkout rack... But we'll leave that sort of rumormongering to them (although we hear a certain thirtysomething glamour queen has...)."


Come on EW! Don't spare us the details just because they're salacious. We want them because they're salacious.

Luckily for us, the web is awash in sites like Awful Plastic Surgery, that not only name names, but show before and after photos. Stars can nip and tuck, but they can't duck and hide.

Related: Last month, the EW obsessives at Reviewing Entertainment Weekly turned the tables on the mag and wondered what its writers and editors look like. Memo to writer Chris Nashawaty: You've got an admirer out there with a dirty mind.
Saving Face [EW]
Awful Plastic Surgery
Show me the pictures! [Reviewing Entertainment Weekly]