Renee Zellweger showed up at an Elle magazine event last night and immediately stole the show by not looking much like Renee Zellweger. "Is that you, Renee Zellweger," reads the headline at CNN. The Daily News, meanwhile, interviews plastic surgeons to weigh in on what work the 45-year-old actress might have had done. (Sample suggestions: Botox, fillers in her face, maybe "a nose job to remake her face from perky to steely.") Or maybe ... nothing? Perhaps plastic surgery is "so commonplace that even those of us who disapprove can’t quite tell anymore when we’re seeing a face that’s been fixed versus one that’s untouched," write Amy Argetsinger and Emily Yahr at the Washington Post.
Their "22 thoughts about a startling new face" blog post also observes that by day's end, "Twitter sentiment seemed to have swung from 'what did Renee Zellweger do to her face?' to 'leave Renee Zellweger alone.'" Amen, writes Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy at the Guardian. Female celebrities just can't win. "Dare to age? Face-shame at best and be out of work at worst," she writes. Dare to have plastic surgery, and "you will be mocked for your narcissism and delusional attempts at hanging on to your youth." Our celeb-obsessed culture "has birthed a strange phenomenon: the bodies of total strangers are considered collective public property to be casually evaluated, critiqued ... and discarded." (More Renee Zellweger stories.)