Nowadays, plastic surgery rumors have become almost a rite of passage for celebrities who achieve success and rise to fame. Stars who have been in the industry for decades like Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston, and Demi Moore have long faced these speculations, but even child stars like Zendaya have been caught up in rumors she’s gone under the knife (which a plastic surgeon has since shot down). Most actresses and musicians either denied having had any work done or admitted to getting only cosmetic enhancements like fillers and Botox. However, with the stigma around plastic surgery slowly disappearing as procedures become increasingly accessible, quite a few celebrities have come clean about getting parts of their face or body tweaked, such as Chrissy Teigen, Bella Hadid, and Megan Fox, the latter of whom was refreshingly honest about the surgeries she has gotten and wants to get someday on “Call Her Daddy.”

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While she’s no longer as high-profile as she was back in the ’90s, Jennifer Love Hewitt, one of Hollywood’s most down-to-earth celebrities, also became the target of plastic surgery rumors in August 2023 after hairstylist Nikki Lee shared video of the singer-actress getting her brown-blonde hair cut to a chin-length bob and dyed red. While her look got plenty of praise, some Instagram users claimed it wasn’t just her hair that underwent a major change. “Forget about the hair, what happened to her face? … There’s nothing left of the Jennifer I knew [and] don’t like it,” one person commented.

Hewitt clapped back at the speculations by posting on Instagram Stories since-deleted images with filters that made her face look cartoonish and sarcastically captioning them (via Allure): “So many people said I look different. I look the same as always. Couldn’t look more natural … Filters don’t change you that much.”

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One persistent rumor about Jennifer Love Hewitt’s appearance was that she underwent a surgical procedure to raise her brows, as they appear more lifted in recent photos and videos of her compared to those from her 20s. However, she denied this claim in a clip, saying (per Allure), “I’ve had a lot of people lately say that I’ve had a brow-lifting procedure. I don’t what that — I didn’t even know you could lift your brows like that.” She explained that microblading and products such as the Brow Harmony Flexible Lifting Gel from Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty gave her the appearance of full, lifted brows without going under the knife.

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Four months after her hair transformation video, Hewitt discussed being deemed “unrecognizable” and accused of getting plastic surgery during an interview on “Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum.” She suggested that the backlash to both the video and her attempt to joke about her use of a filter on her makeup-free face stemmed from ageism. “Aging in Hollywood is really hard. It’s really hard because you can’t do anything right,” she lamented.

The actress went on to share that most of her longtime fans, especially those around her age, have been supportive as they’re experiencing the same changes that come with aging. But Hewitt admitted she can’t help but pay attention to the negativity because one of her three kids with her husband Brian Hallisay is a girl. “It’s dangerous what we put on people. It’s dangerous, I think, to say to women, ‘You can’t look like you’re not 22 to me anymore because I don’t know how to take that,'” she said. “Oh well, that’s your problem because I’m 44, and this is what I look like.”

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