This weekend, I was idly browsing at a newsstand when I did a double-take on the following magazine cover:
"Who is that?" I wondered, furrowing my brow. "It almost looks like Brittany Murphy, but she doesn't have a honker that huge."
But then I read the cover line, and learned that -- if the thick white text is to be believed -- that is indeed Brittany Murphy, and apparently, if you photograph her from a certain angle, she does have a honker that huge.
The photo, to me, looks nothing like her at all. Obviously, there is shades of Brittany in it, but on the whole it doesn't resemble relatively fine-featured twig we've come to recognize from posters for Little Black Book, or various pictures at red-carpet events, or that unfortunate time period during which her tongue was never more than an inch away from Ashton Kutcher's face.
She looks... weird. Worse. The photohrapher has taken her already pointy features and found a way to add hardness to them. Her browline looks more severe somehow; her smile, photoshopped from another photo entirely. And her nose has a hook and a girth to it that doesn't show up in any other photo of her that I've ever seen.
Oh, wait -- except for this one, an almost identical cover shot on Marie Claire from September 2003:
This one might a) be even worse, and b) look even less like Brittany Murphy than the current one. I don't know what it is, but it's like her features seen from this side provide an entirely different visual. At first glance, I was, again, wondering if I'd gotten wrong the identity of the cover model.
Perhaps Ms. Murphy pissed off someone at Marie Claire. Or maybe the photographer just thinks her Holly Hunter side is her only good one; either way, she really ought to stop posing for them before every plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills calls and offers her a free downsizing.
