The nip/tuck duck

Rarely has such a thin torso caused such a fat commotion. When a paparazzo last week smashed into Lindsay Lohan’s Mercedes-Benz, photographers say, it was clear what he was after: Telltale shots of the tween idol’s rapidly diminishing frame.

“She’s lost tons of weight -- that’s the hot story. How anorexic she looks,” said veteran celebrity photographer Phil Ramey before the car crash. That, plus the inevitable Hollywood follow-up question: Did she or didn’t she?

Specifically, did the 18-year-old tween idol, star of “The Parent Trap,” “Freaky Friday” and the upcoming “Herbie” sequel, acquire her new Paris Hilton-Nicole Richie-esque physique with the aid of, among other things, plastic surgery?

Never mind her representatives’ flat-out denials. Inquiring minds wanted, needed -- were in fact paying cash money -- to know whether liposuction was involved. Or breast reduction. Or whether she’d secretly had breast augmentation last year and then secretly undone it when her bombshell body began to conflict with her brand as a wholesome Disney protege.

Lohan is far from the only star lately to be forced into issuing vehement plastic surgery denials that the chattering public then just as vehemently ignores.

Even as the world’s all-media-all-the-time culture pressures those in the spotlight to look increasingly perfect, the boom in celebrity gossip -- abetted by globalized tabloids, digital cameras and an explosion of scoop-hungry websites -- has made nip-tuck speculation a factor for even the lesser stars.

Online Nosy Parkers, for instance, can link from any number of tabloid websites to awfulplasticsurgery.com or goodplasticsurgery.com, its sister, and see close-ups of Jessica Simpson’s lips, which her publicist says were not injected with collagen.

Also there for perusal is Tara Reid’s breast, which slipped from her evening dress in public last year and was photographed clearly enough that several websites have handily zoomed in on what may or may not be the scar from an implant. (Reid’s response then and now was “no comment,” according to her current and former publicists.)

But if anything has grown faster than celebrity plastic surgery accusations, it’s the anger of accused celebrities. Sharon Stone sued a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who claimed to have worked on her last year. “Desperate Housewives” star Nicollette Sheridan went on Access Hollywood last year to deny rumors she’d been to a plastic surgeon after syndicated gossip columnist Liz Smith said she looked “a little transgendered.”

Local news anchor-turned-actress Bree Walker blogged on her sheblog.net about “the meanness that’s infected our popular culture” after what she termed a “creepy plastic surgery website that’s full of lies” implied that she’d had work done.

Meanwhile, publicists for Lohan’s film “Herbie: Fully Loaded” are presenting entertainment reporters with a long list of topics about which Lohan cannot be asked during the movie’s press junket, including, most prominently, her body and her weight.

Polls may show that cosmetic surgery is losing its stigma; prime-time television may be riddled with tummy tucks, nose jobs and extreme makeovers; you may have just bought a Botox party at your kids’ school’s silent auction and the guy in the next cubicle may bore you all day with tales of his new life-altering hair plugs.

But when it comes to their bodies and faces, “celebrities are talking the same amount as they always have,” says Joan Kron, who pens Allure magazine’s “Scalpel News” column and wrote the book “Lift: Wanting, Fearing and Having a Face Lift.”

“Which is, they don’t talk. It’s as if their stock goes down if they’re not what they appear to be.”

Why deny?

“Don’t people know that plastic surgery makes them look weird?” demands the founder and sole employee of goodplasticsurgery.com and awfulplasticsurgery.com, a 31-year-old Los Angeles Web hobbyist who agreed to be interviewed on condition that she be identified only as “Tara,” her first name.

“People’s lips don’t get bigger as they age. Their hairlines don’t grow backwards. They don’t get cat eyes.”

These facts of life, she said, have generated some 8 million hits a month for the two sites she launched two years ago as a lighthearted diversion from her day job in “customer service”; over time, she’s come to view the then-and-now photos she runs as a “wake up” for both those in the limelight and the culture that makes them.

“Why don’t these people stand up to these corporations that run TV and the movies?” she asked. “You shouldn’t have to maim yourself just to stay competitive.”

“You can’t blame them,” answers Santa Monica plastic surgeon Steven Teitelbaum, who, like most of his Westside colleagues, forbids his staff to discuss clients, well-known or otherwise. “A celebrity’s only bankable asset is their persona.”

Whether it’s speaking out politically or parsing their weight loss, he said, “what they say or do can affect their careers.”

Online examinations

For one thing, cosmetic surgery can draw attention to shortcomings stars may not want noticed.

“It’s like a chink in their beauty armor,” says Mary Powers, another Westside plastic surgeon, recalling a client who is regularly photographed in magazines and who explained to her the other day why she’d never admit to the Botox and Restylane treatments Powers was administering.

“She said, ‘You never admit it -- you never admit to having a fault, because then everybody will see it.’ When you’re adored and admired for a certain kind of appearance, you don’t want to give away secrets. It’s sort of an enigma thing.”

Moreover, says Mark Lisanti, editor of the West Coast gossip site Defamer.com, the Internet has exponentially increased the speed with which even the smallest detail of a celebrity’s looks can be analyzed and remarked on, making the appropriate response even more imperative.

“The Internet tends to be quicker than almost anything, and speculation about physical appearance is so easy to show on a website,” said Lisanti, whose site has dubbed Lohan “The Incredible Shrinking Starlet” and visually chronicled every rise and fall of her weight and bust line.

“You just throw up some side-by-sides,” he said.

In such a world, he said -- a world of text-messaged party gossip and cellphone nightclub candids, in which anyone with a camera or weblog can become a paparazzo or gossip columnist overnight -- the best defense is a set of tight lips, Lisanti said.

Witness the limited response from, say, Michael Douglas, when British tabloid photos of him at a Barbados restaurant appeared in April, prominently featuring what appeared to be face-lift sutures near one ear.

“We had no response, except that he had some lesions removed,” said Douglas’ publicist Allen Burry. “That was the only response I ever gave, which I gave to the New York Post.” Asked if the veteran actor had ever had plastic surgery, the publicist declined to comment: “That’s as much as I really want to talk about it.”

Keeping a secret

Also useful are the protocols of Hollywood doctors -- the house calls and after-hours appointments for well-known clients, the allowances for those who’d prefer to sign in under pseudonyms. The sharing of office space with dermatologists so that if a patient is seen in the waiting room, Teitelbaum said, “there’s no way to know whether they’re there for a mole check or surgery.”

There are, of course, the brave few who don’t mind being poster children for cosmetic procedures, but they tend either to be rebels (Cher, for example, or Courtney Love or Jane Fonda) or comedians -- and rarely men.

“Comediennes are the only ones who are anywhere nearly honest about it,” Kron said. “Roseanne, Carol Burnett, Phyllis Diller ... “ In Allure’s July issue, in fact, Joan Rivers, the self-proclaimed 71-year-old “poster girl for plastic surgery,” opens her medical records for Kron, documenting four decades’ worth of procedures, from her first eye-lift in 1965 to her most recent round of Botox.

The article, an advance copy of which was obtained by The Times, counts two full face-lifts, a thinned nose, another eye job, liposuction, two neck tightenings, a brow lift, Botox and collagen every four months since the 1990s, a procedure to lift the outer corners of her eyes, another to lift the corners of her mouth, and several chemical peels.

“It’s about fine-tuning,” Rivers says in the article. “You fine-tune your car; you repaint your apartment; when the rug gets shabby, you replace it.”

What it says about you

But most celebrities -- like most non-famous people -- are less sanguine about artificial alterations to their appearance and more attuned to the assumptions plastic surgery can engender about their level of confidence and emotional health.

“I think it is when people have lost touch with their spirit, their life force, that they become most vulnerable to consumer culture and the toxic drive for perfection,” Jane Fonda writes in her memoir, “My Life So Far.”

In the mid-1980s, she writes, she experienced a sort of midlife crisis -- her creativity was flagging and her marriage to Tom Hayden was crumbling: “Instead off dealing with my crisis in a real way, I got breast implants.”

“I am ashamed of this, but I understand why I did it at the time. I somehow believed that if I looked more womanly, I would become more womanly. So much of my life had become a facade; what did it matter if I added my body to the list of falsehoods?”

In some ways, experts say, Fonda’s attitude reflects the prejudices of the broader public.

“Most people don’t want to think that a celebrity’s appearance has been conjured. At a deep, psychological level, it makes them uncomfortable somehow,” Teitelbaum said.

“I don’t know how much of that is programmed into us, but when someone is perfect looking, I wonder if we think of them as being somehow favored by the man upstairs,” he said. “People want to think those kinds of looks are God-given .... I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but at some level, I think a lot of people think of plastic surgery as a cheat.”

So, for the celebrities who fear they won’t work if the public knows where those taut profiles really came from, a new lexicon of dodging has evolved, observers say.

There’s, “It’s not my thing, but never say never.” And, “My secret? Lots of water.” And, “I credit it all to my yoga teacher/therapist/guru/nutritionist/personal trainer.”

Kron says she’s heard them all, and often they’re even true -- by Hollywood standards. “Because remember,” she said, “Botox and collagen don’t count.”

Then there are the limited non-denial denials.

“A face-lift is shame, so they’ll say, ‘I just had my eyes done -- I don’t need a face-lift yet,’ ” Kron said. “Or they’ll say, ‘I just had my lower face done.’ Well, honey, a face-lift by definition is the lower face.”

So what about Lohan and her ever-fascinating cleavage?

“She has never, never had plastic surgery anywhere. She merely has lost weight and baby fat,” her publicist Leslie Sloane reiterated before the no-body-questions edict last week.

But the chatter continues.

“I tend to agree with the suggestion that breast implants have very likely been removed,” opined Orange County plastic surgeon John Di Saia in “Truth in Plastic Surgery,” his weblog.

“Our pictures show her breast size must have dropped a size and a half, which proves she doesn’t have implants,” mulled celebrity photographer Ramey.

“I don’t know,” Lisanti said. “This story always seems to crest, doesn’t it? And then a whole new batch of photos comes out. Thirty pounds later, two cup sizes smaller. There’s a lot going on with that body, isn’t there?”