Kylie Minoque botox rumours: Her face is raising a few eyebrows
Kylie Minoque is furious.
After she was photographed in London the other night, it was noted by many that she seemed to have morphed into a brunette doppelganger of her little sister Dannii, the one who used to play Saturday-night telly dolly to Kylies global star.
Much worse than that, the internet was ablaze with speculation about the fact that Kylies lovely face looked somewhat frozen.
Frozen in time: How Kylie Minogue looked when she attended George Michael's private dinner and auction at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, this week
The question was: what had Kylie done? Was it more Botox, which she once said she had tried and then forsaken? Has she had an eyelift? A browlift? Fillers? Or an anaesthetised smorgasbord of all of these?
Online comments about the picture, taken outside her friend George Michaels private dinner and concert at the Royal Opera House, varied from the affectionate we love you whatever you look like, to the downright cruel she looks like a Doctor Who creature and get out of the wind tunnel.
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There were even some unkind references to Michael Jackson and New Yorks infam! ous plas tic surgery addict, Jocelyn Wildenstein.
No wonder Kylie felt moved to respond to the onslaught.
So, I have been filmed out in public the last three nights & suddenly it is reported I cannot move my face? What a load of rubbish. Annoying, she bit back on Twitter.
The eyebrow has it: A fresh-faced Kylie in her Neighbours days (left), but something's been making her look more startled over the years (right and below)
What's she had done? Kylie, pictured at the Brit Awards (left) and the ELLE Style Awards (right) in 2008, has been holding back the years remarkably well
Let us give Kylie the benefit of the doubt and accept the fact that, at 43, her taut, line-free skin is testament, as she claims, to the magical powers of boring old Ponds Cold Cream (3.99 for 75ml), as used by her mother, Carol. Their surge in sales will be so huge I doubt Kylie will ever have to pay for a jar again.
It is certainly true, moreover, that her oddly raised right eyebrow, often attributed to Botox as it is a common side-effect of the muscle-freezing injections, has long been a part of her appearance.
Let us accept, too, that the sudden change in her hair colour is as much to blame for the fascination with her looks as her billiard-ball-smooth brow.
The singer once said that she hadnt seen her natural hair colour since she was 16. Since then she has had blonde ringlets, poker-straight redhead locks, brunette waves! and jus t about everything in between.
These startling changes do, perhaps, attract over-zealous scrutiny of a stars appearance.
Combating aging: Kylie, like Madonna, has become a mistress of reinvention
Besides, there are many other women Madonna, Carla Bruni, Priscilla Presley whose mysteriously youthful faces deserve far greater snorts of derision.
Yet even we die-hard Kylie fans look at her new image and find ourselves wondering whats happened to the sweet survivor we used to know, and whether our girl-next-door has moved a little too far down Fame Street.
I blame the men (well, its easier that way) and particularly the fact that Kylie, still unmarried, has chosen a much younger, staggeringly good-looking Spanish boyfriend.
Smouldering Andres Velencoso is 33 and a model. English, naturally, is not his first language, and Kylie doesnt speak Spanish.
Even if it was initially a meeting of minds, she could be forgiven for wanting to slather on the cold cream more enthusiastically than usual.
But, in truth, the rot began with other rotters. Previous boyfriends were no more relaxing for a girl, like Kylie, struggling to adjust to the arrival of her middle years.
There was another youthful male model, James Gooding, and the French heart-throb actor Olivier Martinez, who moved on to the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and is currently dating Hollywood star Halle Berry.
Kylie says that her romance with Velencoso is her most grown up relationship to date, although she does admit: Im not sure what grown up actually means. So its not just that face that is resisting growing older!
Kylie has nearly three decades of career behind her since she first appeared as a child star in her native Australia and shot to fame as the toolbox-wielding chirpy girl mechanic Charlene in Neighbours.
Like Madonna, she became a mistress of ! reinvent ion, Again, a man was to blame.
It was Michael Hutchence, lead singer with INXS and later the doomed lover of Paula Yates, who made it his mission to corrupt Kylie.
Start of the rot: Michael Hutchence (left), the lead singer of INXS, made it his missions to 'corrupt Kylie'. She gyrated a lot on stage after meeting him
And indeed she did go all sexy and gyrate a lot on stage in hotpants after she met him.
Yet after she recovered from breast cancer in 2005, and spoke so movingly about her battle the surgery, the hair loss, the fear she rightly became more popular than ever.
It proved that beneath the veneer of glamour that fame affords, Kylie was all-too human. And we loved her for it. People the world over saluted the good humour and courage she displayed.
Surely no one who has endured a hellish experience such as that would ever go near a surgeons waiting room again unless they absolutely had to.
Dating boyfriends like model James Gooding (pictured here with her in 2000) made it harder for Kylie to adjust to life in her middle years
But perhaps only those who have been famous in their youth the child and teen stars will ever really understand what it is like to age under the public gaze.
So many years of fame necessitate changes of image for singers in particular, because the pressure is always on to be as electric as the newest acts coming up behind them.
Which is perhaps the most curious part of Kylies latest transformation. Because it is a tribute to her charm and talent that she, above all ageing pop stars, didnt neednt to fret about her appearance too much, because her allure was never based solely on her looks to begin with.
Cute and smiley as she had always been, the whol! e point of her was that she was never unattainably beautiful.
It was that she could sing a catchy dance tune and radiate a wholesome sex appeal that was always more cheerful than frightening.
In other words, we were drawn to her strength, her Aussie optimism, her character.
The one thing we fans would never want Kylie to do is to attempt to eradicate that magnetic character from her lovely face.
That would show fear when, from Kylie, we expect to see hope. Hope wreathed in a beaming face as natural and unaffected as the woman within.
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