Hollywood's idea of beauty once meant polished and slim, not altered and gaunt. This new look is unsettling | Brigid Delaney

"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."

"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."

"The most dramatic recent example is Jim Carrey, who looked so altered that people thought the person on the podium at the 2026 Cesar awards was a body double. The 64-year-old's eyes were wide, his cheeks plumped and defined, his skin strangely smooth. Even his eye colour appeared to have been altered."

Hollywood's traditional beauty ideal emphasized healthy, glowing, symmetrical, and slim appearances that represented optimized versions of ordinary people. Celebrities achieved this through fasting, professional styling, borrowed luxury items, and subtle cosmetic procedures. This standard was unattainable but comprehensible and widely aspired to. Contemporary Hollywood beauty, however, has diverged significantly from this coherent ideal. The public now responds to dramatically altered celebrities with concern and alienation rather than admiration. Social media comments express worry about health and preference for celebrities' previous appearances rather than aspiration. Recent awards seasons have featured multiple stars whose extreme weight loss or excessive cosmetic enhancement sparked public concern, exemplified by Jim Carrey's dramatically altered appearance at the 2026 Cesar Awards, which prompted media verification of his identity.

Read at www.theguardian.com