SANTA ROSA, Calif. – Sometimes you put your reporter’s notebook away and walk outside and wonder if you really just asked a cosmetic surgeon, “So what can we expect after lips?”
And he says, “Foreheads are really on the way.”
But we’re jumping trends.
There are probably some people who went to the movie “Beaches” in order to hear Bette Midler sing. Others stared at Hershey’s lips.
We’d read about how Barbara Hershey had her lips injected to make them fuller.
This then was not simply a story about friendship. This was about collagen, a milky looking protein found in cowhide which in recent years has gone into restructuring the human skin, most often to fill in the gaps that create facial wrinkles.
Barbara was fascinating. The last time we saw her, albeit in a serious role, she had a stern mouth to match her business suit.
This time she was meek and kind of pitiful, but with a mouth like the inside of a ripe persimmon.
They looked like the lips of a girl in high school who always made “liver lip” jokes about herself, competing for self-deprecation
points when the rest of the girls complained about fat stomachs or stringy hair.
HOPEFULLY, WHEREVER she is today she’s finally proud of her lips. She could play Barbara Hershey’s mouth, easy.
Her turn has come, as opposed to others who react like the teen-ager who read about big lips and sighed, “Naturally. My lips are the only things on my body that aren’t big.”
The face doctor knows about lips. He agrees, “There’s been an increased interest in a youthful pucker.”
Not that the demand for lips is anywhere near that of noses, the lead item in his business, explains Dr. Larry Schoenrock.
As head of the facial plastics surgery program at the University of California Medical Center, he must keep up on such . trends.
He just did a ballerina from the East Coast.
“She had very fine lips and wanted to increase their bulk.” He did hers by surgically remodeling top lip tissue and curling the lip out.
That way lasts longer than the kind of plumping most people are doing these days, which is to take a long lunch hour, get a shot in the lips and come back to work looking like Diane Sawyer. The procedure runs about $300.
Injected lips reportedly don’t lose any sensation. It’s not like trying to eat ice cream right after a root canal. But the hitch is the
filling doesn’t last for more than eight months to a year.
AND THEN YOU need another shot.
One magazine explains the lip craze as part of a new beauty standard that goes beyond the. once-popular golden goddess, rich American
girl look to include big and bold ethnic features.
But, back to foreheads.
“People are becoming concerned about their foreheads. They want to get rid of the scowls, the tired look.”
One forehead he smoothed belongs to a teacher who had parents complain she was mean looking.
He lifted the muscles on her face, and the gloom went away.
That process also saves the brows from starting to droop. But he cautions, “You can’t do too much or you get someone who looks constantly surprised.”
– Commentary by Susan Swartz, distributed by The New York Times News Service, appears each Friday in the Journal-World.
One thought on “BetteBack March 17, 1989: Lip Injections And Foreheads”
I never understood the fascination with Barbara Hershey’s lips in Beaches. It’s never bothered me and I would have never known she had injections if I hadn’t read about it.
I never understood the fascination with Barbara Hershey’s lips in Beaches. It’s never bothered me and I would have never known she had injections if I hadn’t read about it.