Let me see your lips...

Hollywood, California has to be one of the toughest places to try to live and make a living. Everything I read, every news story I see from Tinseltown, tells another tale of actors (women, mostly) striving to look better, be accepted, be perfect, be adored. So often, that striving leads these women to order up surgeries that result in science-fiction results:  plumper foreheads, protruding cheeks, and trout pout (one of the newest trends and one about which I just learned a bit more).

Trout pout is apparently the Hollywood term for lip-plumping-gone-bad. I’m sure you’ve seen it. In one photo an actress will look perfectly normal, and in the next her misshapen lips take up half her face. They look like air bags. Seriously, Google it. A news story I saw about this very thing the other day said that lip-filling (beyond a certain psi) is not an exact procedure; the results are unpredictable and often asymmetrical. Yet, women in the spotlight continue to do it with the idea that “plumper” means “younger.” I was so ahead of my time.

Filling up one’s lips with collagen or fat, or injecting botulism into one’s skin, seem awfully extreme to me. All I have to think about are the needles and the “what-ifs.” I can’t imagine being so desperate for youth and beauty that the “what-ifs” don’t matter. I’m not being judgmental; I really feel for the women who are compelled to take this procedure to the extreme (and isn’t everything in Hollywood extreme?).

I think that’s why I like the actress Kathy Bates so much. Of course, she’s wildly talented (remember her in “Misery?”), but she’s also just Kathy Bates. She’s pretty in her own way. She’s confident, talented and real. And I’ll bet she can even feel her lips.

Carole Townsend is also a Gwinnett Daily Post staff correspondent and author of the recently-released book, “Southern Fried White Trash.” The book takes a humorous look at families and how we behave when thrown together for weddings, funerals and holidays. She has been quoted on msnbc.com, in the LA Times, USA Today and the Christian Science Monitor, been featured on FOX 5 News and CNN, and is often a guest on television and radio shows nationwide.