Sometimes when you go a long time without seeing a person, you can be surprised by the changes they’ve undergone. People age. People gain or lose weight. People go through good and bad health.
Renée Zellweger (born April 25, 1969, 2:41 PM, Baytown Texas) is someone we haven’t seen a lot of in the last few years. And when she returned to the public eye this week, our first response was “excuse me, can we see some ID?”
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Cases of celebrity plastic surgery gone wrong can tell us a lot about ourselves. We all like to say things like “why can’t celebrities age gracefully?” or “why can’t people accept aging is natural?” yet so many of us, given the financial wherewithal, like to think “well, maybe just a little Botox” or “maybe I could get rid of just a few of these wrinkles” or maybe if I could take the chin up just a little.”
Over the course of the last three years, Renée has been experiencing transiting Pluto trine her natal Ascendant. The Ascendant rules how we come across to people and what we actually physically look like. Pluto brings dramatic change and transformation. Many people experiencing this transit will experience significant changes to the relationship or their role in life.
Renée Zellweger has actually gotten a new face out of this transit.
This is not a tale of plastic surgery disaster. This is not Meg Ryan destroying her famous good looks or Bruce Jenner turning himself into a perpetually frightened wax manikin or Kim Kardashian slowly sinking into an ocean of sculpted blandness. This is simply Renée Zellweger removing the identifying features from her face.
What’s strange to me about all this is that if you hadn’t seen her before, you wouldn’t necessarily suspect she had plastic surgery at all. You would simply assume that she was a generically attractive woman ten years younger than she actually is. But the weird thing is: it just isn’t Renée Zellweger anymore.
The reaction to Renée’s new face raises all sorts of questions about how we as a culture value women based on appearance, how Hollywood specifically treats women over the age of 30, and so on. Yes, it is unfair… you won’t get an argument out of me about that. But when we talk about “culture” (whether Western Culture as a whole or Hollywood Culture or whatever) we have to remember that it breaks down into individual cases. And in at least this one case, it seems to have made for some dramatic results.
The Uranus-Pluto square hits the exact degree next in December, and it makes an exact quincunx and trine to her Ascendant at that time. It will be interesting to see what this does to her public image, as we prepare for her first film appearance in several years in 2015.
Meanwhile: this Thursday’s Solar Eclipse at 0° Scorpio is in close conjunction to Bruce Jenner’s natal Ascendant. I am not certain what effects of this may have on his physical appearance over the next few months, but I’ve provided an illustration above that summarizes the work he’s had done on himself so far.
All I know for sure is: I used to like how Renée Zellweger looked. Anybody with any sense at all knows that “beauty is only skin deep,” but at the same time when I look at her now, I can’t help but wonder if she doesn’t have a door on her back where the fresh batteries go in.
What this reminds of, more than anything else, is this news story that was going around last year. Researchers digitally combined the photos of thousands of women to produce statistically “average” faces. Even though these pictures were the very definition of “average” they all turned out to be pretty attractive. And why is that? Because we are born to look for symmetry and a lack of quirks in faces… which is something no naturally-occuring face completely has. Statistically shave off all the individuality and you get something like what we are neurologically programmed to think of as “beauty.” That’s fine for a statistical composite, but when you surgically do that to an actual person’s face? There results are kind of… disturbing.
So just remember: you don’t have to be perfect to be beautiful, but without your imperfections you’d probably be forgettable. And what use is easily-forgotten beauty?
“If everybody looked the same/We’d get tired of looking at each other.”
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