The other day, I threw up some photos of Catherine Zeta-Jones at the Chaplin Awards Gala, which was Monday (I put them in the links on Tuesday). While I focused on her unflattering sparkly trash-bag dress, I did notice that it wasn’t really Catherine’s best public appearance by a long shot. She looked tired. She looked thin and drawn. And her makeup looked poorly applied. Still – beautiful woman, and even beauties have off-days. Not according to The Daily Mail, however. The Mail’s Alice Hart-Davis and British plastic surgeon dissected everything that was wrong with Catherine’s appearance, and they are exhaustive in their criticism. The full bitchy Mail piece is here (including some supposedly high-res photos of Catherine that I think are retouched to make her look worse), and here are some of the highlights:

Oh Catherine, whatever is going on with your face? That photograph taken on Monday as you arrived at the Film Society’s Chaplin Award Gala in New York was attention-grabbing for all the wrong reasons. Dull, lifeless skin with open pores and blemishes, puffy eyes, and a curiously smooth-looking forehead.

Catherine, who also appears to have lost a lot of weight, says that the way she looks is just the result of fitting in seven shows a week on Broadway with all the usual demands of family life. Whatever she is or isn’t doing to herself, one thing looks clear: she’s not only working too hard, but trying too hard.

Here, ALICE HART-DAVIS and plastic surgeon RAJIV GROVER deconstruct Catherine’s latest look:

HAIR: We’re used to CZJ with her tumbling, maid-of-the-valleys locks. Scraping it back so severely gives an all-too-clear view of every aspect of her face and as a result is very ageing on someone only 40. Is this the celebrity version of the infamous ‘Croydon facelift’, where pulling the hair back into a tight ponytail lifts the skin around the eyes and forehead? It also reveals the odd filament of silver-grey hair which, being coarser and harder to tame than other hairs, are striving to wriggle free from her slicked back ‘do’.

FACE: ‘Before Catherine had children, her brow line always looked quite low,’ says surgeon Rajiv Grover. ‘It didn’t flatter her and it now appears higher, emphasising the youth and brightness of her eyes, which is something that could be achieved with an endoscopic brow lift.’

FOREHEAD: However tight that bun is pulled, the preternatural smoothness of Catherine’s forehead makes it look suspiciously like that of a habitual Botox-user. In the high-resolution version of this photo, which I’ve cranked up to maximum enlargement, there isn’t a single furrow or fault-line on her forehead which, for someone who has reached 40, is both unusual and remarkable.

‘My experience of patients who appear in the public eye is that very few of them could look as good as they do without some support,’ says Rajiv Grover.

LIPS: There have, in the past, been photos of Catherine with lips that look as if they are inflating, rather than deflating, with age. But in this shot, there is no sign of the tell-tale raised edge to her lips that is the giveaway of having had lip-filling injections.

COMPLEXION: Eesh! She’s wearing a lot of foundation which is also clinging on to and showing up every bit of roughness and the odd acne-scar on her cheeks. Too much time spent in the sun? That can roughen the smoothest skin. E yes: Catherine is popularly supposed to have had a blepharoplasty, aka an eye-lift, around 2001, though this is not something that she has seen fit to discuss. The wrinkles beneath her eyes are small but in evidence – doubtless the natural result of time and her full life with work, marriage and children taking its toll.

‘Her eyes don’t look in any way “lifted”,’ says Rajiv Grover, ‘though they do look brighter and more open than before, which might have been achieved by an endoscopic brow lift rather than blepharoplasty.’

EYEBROWS: Her natural eyebrows once fulsome and bushy, have been pruned within an inch of their life. Then, to go with her heavy evening make-up, they’ve been carefully enhanced with eyebrow pencil or eyeshadow, to the extent that they appear to have been dyed, shaped and stuck on.

DIET AND EXERCISE: CZJ has usually had a remarkably relaxed attitude to diet and exercise, railing against the Hollywood cult of the super-skinny, and happily admitting to piling on 50lb during her first pregnancy, which took ‘diet and exercise’ to shift. When she began to look alarmingly thin, in October 2007, she had to deny reports that she was anorexic. She didn’t look a whole lot fatter by the opening night of her Broadway show last December. Dance has always been her favourite exercise choice; after the birth of her daughter Carys seven years ago, she used a tough, dance-based routine to get back into shape.

‘My muscles have memory from the time I danced, and it’s quick for me to get back in shape, but I’m not fanatical,’ she says. Now, though, it looks as if she has gone too far.

[From The Daily Mail]

I’ll say it again – I do think Zeta looked like hell for this appearance. Not just hell, she looked like an old lady, much older than her (alleged) real age of 40. In recent red carpet appearances, she has tended to look thin and tired, but still beautiful, so I don’t know what’s going on with her. Maybe she really did struggle with her role on Broadway. Maybe she’s just going through a rough patch. Maybe she needs a new plastic surgeon, I don’t know.