Published in Big Hyderabad November 2008
…and dreaming about looking like your favorite star doing yoga and following a diet, your fave stars underwent a host of treatments to look so good.
One of the first things my cousin reads in every magazine is the sample diet of a celebrity who look Wow even when she is way past 50. Oh yes, the diets that talk of an egg white for breakfast, a glass of cranberry juice for mid-morning, one phulka with salad for lunch and things like that. Another two hundred words about her Yoga or aerobics exercise regime.
Well, if you are one of those who have ‘weight loss’ as your keyword in life, and have been envying actor or actress – from Hema Malini to Malaika Arora Khan and Sanjay Dutt to Ronit Roy, you really need to read about what most of the celebs do to look young and beautiful.
Behind all the stuff you read about egg white breakfast and sandwich for dinner schedules, there are weekly appointments with the beauty parlor for de-sagging facials, wrinkle-stopping massages and wart-removing treatments.
That done, the next few days are spent at the aesthetic medicine specialist who puts your celeb through his Botox injections and face lifts. Yes, an insta facelift – a half hour procedure where electrodes put on your facial skin give a slight tinge to iron out the wrinkles temporarily – easily covers up the wrinkles and the age on your celeb’s skin when she is doing the cover shot for the beauty magazine. From Rs 5,000 a session to Rs 6 lakh, the face lift can cost anything depending on what the celeb needs. This is besides the real face lift using Thermage (a new anti-ageing technology) and the collagen stimulation. Not to forget about Botox and anti-wrinkle treatments.
For that hot bod with an enviable silhouette, a team of doctors and experts would have worked on, for several sessions. On a good day, the hot looking star you are dying to look like may have had electronic muscle stimulation programs for at least three weeks before she or he posed before the camera. These stimulations are 30- to 40-minute passive, non-aerobic workout to all major muscle groups delivered through small pads placed on the body. This massage-like session yields almost instant tightening of muscles and lost inches. Ha, and you thought if you did Ashtanga Yoga for six months or survived on Cabbage soup, you would get a figure or skin like hers!
No, we are not done yet. A week before your star appeared for the Award nights to give a performance or walk away with a trophy, he would have had a Body Wrap. Here, your star has been coated with an herbal body treatment and then wrapped in muslin or plastic sheets for 45 minutes to an hour. As she relaxes planning for the photo shoot, she is on a vibrating bed while dry sauna heat elevates the heart rate. Herbal lotions are applied and the combination of heat, massage and elevated heart rate result in a “shrinking” of tissue. What you see is a super slim figure with all her assets in the right size and shape! All this coupled with the final Photoshop touches given by the page designer of the fashion magazine!
While you were working hard at your office, they were spending their time and energy trying to keep the wrinkles at bay, fight the sagging skin and look younger. So next time you see a sexy celeb looking twenty years younger than her calendar age and talking about having buttermilk for breakfast, you know the secret, don’t you!
