10.04.08
The smoking gun: Palin plastic surgery?
I was working on this post about the Sarah Palin flag pin/brooch issue, and I thought it would be kind of cool to photoshop (actually, paintshop pro) a giant blinking flag sign across her chest, just in case the reason she’s doing poorly is because her flag pin is not large enough.
So I went looking for a photo of her on Google, and I was having a lot of difficulty finding one that showed her upper torso. Most of the photos I found are either official posed photos of her face or shots of her speaking from the chin up.
I finally found this photo on Wikipedia, with a notation that it was “taken at the Alaska Airmen’s Trade Show in Anchorage, Alaska in May 2008″.
I played with it, but it’s not a particularly good photo for what I was intending. However, the more I looked at it, the more I realized that she doesn’t look like that now. Let’s look up close.
Her face is saggy, and her neck and chin are droopy. She looks, maybe 45 or 50. Which, of course, she is. But like I said, she doesn’t look like that now. So I went looking for some more photos.
I remembered reading that several plastic surgeons looked at existing photos of her and, failing to find a “smoking gun” photo, decided she had had a facepeel or something like that. I also remembered that immediately following her selection by John McCain, almost all personal photos were scrubbed off websites she had control over.
So I had to look a while to find another photo from that period. This one is from Monocle, which is some kind of a subscription-only online magazine about Alaska issues. The magazine issue is dated October, 2007.
Now let’s take a look at a closeup.
Note: seeing this, a friend who was unfamiliar with the question going around about the “lipliner tattoos” told me that Sarah’s got lipliner tattoos.
I could only find one more photo from that period that showed her well, the infamous official “family portrait”, undated, but supposedly from October or November of 2007. Clearly it was taken before the long dark winter set in. Find it here.
Let’s get an upclose and personal look at Sarah’s face now. It looks to me like she’s been photoshopped. Look at that perfect, smooth, glossy, waxy tan skin. In November?
So at this point I thought to myself that I wanted to see what she looks like right now as a comparison.
Looking around, I happened across a number of “celebrity” sites where Sarah is featured prominently. Funny, no Barack Obama celebrity page… Is that why McCain shut up about the celebrity shtick? If you read about her “beauty queen” days, you will see that she didn’t win. She came in 3rd at the state pageant and got Miss Congeniality.
Back to the photo hunt.
What a cute “Mom and Dad” picture. Nice firm jawline on a 44 year old woman who has just given birth.
You see this one everywhere. Doesn’t she look great! Now look at the sign in back. The photo is 3 years old.
This one’s a favorite of mine.
What’s going on with her neck? Is that a shadow of an earring? Nope.
It’s two fresh scars that the makeup artist forgot to cover up and the photoshop artist botched. Is that a swelling on her neck?
And now I admit that I didn’t look at her neck in the family photo until I enlarged the face crop and brightened it to see if it changed how her face looked while I was writing this article. It didn’t, but didn’t it bring her neck out of the shadows? Uh, what’s up with that? Did she have a chemical peel on her neck, or get the skin sanded down? And the photo editor missed that when photoshopping her face?
Let’s take another look at that 3 year old photo that was taken while she was running for governor. Let’s look at her neck close up.
She had the same scars on her neck then, but at that time they were faded. Similar scars in the same place…hmm… Now I’m sure there’s a reason. Second necklift? Is that some kind of lesion you see on her neck in the older photo?
Let’s look again at her neck as it appears in the photo at the top of the page. There’s that peel/scarring effect still going on. There’s also a major discoloration where the old scars are, almost like bruising. Is there something going on that we should know about?
Here’s her official state portrait. Nice big smile there, Sarah.
Now compare her lower eyelids in the gubernatorial campaign photo from 3 years ago. In the older photo, again a big grin, but lots of crow’s feet and baggy lower lids.
Now here’s the photo that started my quest. Go back up to the top. Do you think that the woman at the top of this blog entry looked like that last May but like this last Friday night without surgery?
Here’s the two together to compare. Neck lift, mid-facelift, lower eyelid lift, peel, lipo, and cheek implants.
“Joe six-pack” my ass. That’s $50,000-$100,000 worth of plastic surgery you’re looking at. Will the real Sarah Palin please stand up?
