Jocelyn Wildenstein was a cautionary tale of extreme plastic surgery but Gen Z isnt listening

The infamous socialite and so-called “Catwoman” Jocelyn Wildenstein passed away Tuesday at age 84.A case study in extreme plastic surgery, she was also a canary in the coal mine for our cultural obsession with augmentation.She should have been a cautionary tale, like Michael Jackson, of the dangers of going too far in the quest for perfection.

But now, new generations of influencers and celebrities are spending just as much to have even more procedures in the same distorted pursuit.Unfortunately for Wildenstein, she was so far ahead of her time in terms of surgical advancements that she ended up looking botched — freakish, many would say — with her permanently swollen face, chunky cheeks, stretched skin and feline-like eyes, speculated to be inspired by her pet lynx.(Wildly, she told The Sun, “I haven’t had plastic surgery.” But her ex-husband told Vanity Fair: “She was thinking that she could fix her face like a piece of furniture.Skin does not work that way.

But she wouldn’t listen.”)It allegedly started shortly after her marriage to art collector Alec Wildenstein ended in 1978, when she reportedly caught him in bed with a 19-year-old model.Wildenstein had all the money in the world, receiving a $2.5 billion settlement and annual payments of $100 million for 13 years in her divorce settlement.Yet access to top doctors still couldn’t save the once-stunning woman from transforming into a distortion.

Likewise, money and access didn’t keep Michael Jackson from turning himself into a nearly unrecognizable person.Priscilla Presley has been accused of going overboard with Botox and filler. Sharon Osbourne — who admits she is “on face three and counting” — recently told The Sunday Times in 2022 that a facelift left one eye “different to the other” and rendered her looking “like a f–king Cyclops.”It’s not just a slippery slope — it’s a hundred-foot cliff drop surrounded by warning signs.And yet, our culture has ignor...