I’m endlessly fascinated with Hollywood heath and beauty rituals. Is that so wrong?

A million years ago when I was a fact-checker for TV Guide, then based on the outskirts of Philadelphia and arguably at the height of its influence, my co-workers and I used to marvel at how goofy West Coast publicists seemed compared to their East Coast counterparts. New York publicists would bark at us when we attempted to confirm information in those pre-Web days, while those in Burbank or nearby would happily root through their trash to help us when we could catch them on the phone due to time-difference constraints in that less-connected era.

Decades after I moved to L.A., I still feel like a stranger in a strange land upon occasion — especially regarding health and beauty regimens of Hollywood denizens.

Last week, still basking in the afterglow of the Summer Olympics, I caught up with the phenomenon of salmon sperm facials, apparently something that Jennifer Anniston advocated a year ago in a Wall Street Journal feature, and not actually a new trend, just new to me, thanks to Kim Kardashian talking about it in a recent episode of her family’s Hulu reality show and publications dutifully writing about it.

This line in an L.A. mag article about Kardashian’s use of the beauty treatment really amused me:

“The 43-year-old influencer didn’t go into details about how effective injecting milt, which is extracted from fish testicles, was for producing firmer skin.”

The story goes on to explain how the sperm is harvested, in case you were wondering. As for Aniston: “When it comes to looking young, she says she’ll try almost anything once,” per the WSJ.

There have been many health and beauty fads popularized by Hollywood over the decades, some quite ludicrous in retrospect. Watch old movies on TCM and you might see women utilizing ridiculous (to my contemporary eyes) vibrating exercise belts that supposedly melt away fat, while other trends include “Can You Feel It” aerobics of the Jane Fonda era, Suzanne Somers’s Thighmaster device and so on. Decades before superheroes took over the multiplex, studios employed fitness trainers for their talent under contract; these days, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman banter about the latter’s training for Deadpool & Wolverine to the press, including for this Variety cover story.  

There’s undeniably a dark side to Hollywood’s obsession with a camera-ready appearance: Judy Garland was famously addicted to amphetamines by the time she finished filming The Wizard of Oz at age 17, all the better to keep her weight down.

Per just one story about it: “’Most of her teen and adult life, she had been on either Benzedrine or a diet or both,’ Garland’s third husband Sid Luft wrote in his memoir Judy and I: My Life With Judy Garland.”

These days, Ozeimpic is the rage, but if you peruse midcentury women’s magazines, as I recently did while researching period decor for a home renovation, you will come across celebrity-endorsement ads for Ayds “candies,” basically stimulants designed to encourage weight loss. I’m old enough to remember mothers of my friends using these diet aids growing up, but not the celeb endorsements of talent such as Yvonne De Carlo and Hedy Lamarr; I totally missed the mid-‘80s branding issue when people confused the weight loss candy with the similarly named AIDS.

Vintage ads on YouTube repeatedly stress that there are no stimulants in Ayds, and while that might have technically true when they were filmed, the diet reducing candy and others of its ilk contained phenylpropanolamine, a chemical that can be used to make speed that was removed from decongestants and other over the counter medicine due to the risk of stroke. In 1983, the maker of Dexatrim removed similar advertising claims about the safety of PPA, as the chemical is also known, in its diet aids. By 2000, the FDA asked drug manufacturers to stop using it for diet suppressants and decongestants.

Other practices have also been dubious to downright dangerous: Remember phen-fen? It was hugely popular as a weight loss aid a few decades ago, then recalled due to concerns it caused heart problems. And, as someone with a big scar on her leg from melanoma surgery, I wouldn’t recommend you pay heed to TikTokkers’ claims that sunscreen causes cancer or reality star Kristin Cavallari’s suggestion that maybe we don’t need it to guard against skin cancer. (Seriously, protect yourself better than I did as a teen!)

The average celeb-embraced health and beauty fad is relatively harmless, however. The casual observer might think some of the regimens are ridiculous – or that these well-compensated performers should spend their money elsewhere — but does it really matter that beauty-conscious A-listers are trying them? It’s not as if Hollywood itself doesn’t see the humor in some of these exercise and beauty fads, satirizing them in 1930s movies such as The Women and a Betty Boop short on through The Player, where the Hollywood execs retreat to Two Bunch Palms for a mud bath, then quite trendy.

The relatively low stakes of these treatments make it easier to gawk at them, or even consider trying them yourself – whether you take the Paoli local or drive the 405. Stars aren’t always like us, and that is part of the fascination.

More on Hollywood health and fitness:

This Business Insider article provides a broader overview: https://www.businessinsider.com/vintage-photos-exercise-trends-2019-1

Apple TV+’s Physical, starring Rose Byrne as a San Diego mom turned workout queen, channels the era well; it is period appropriate to the point I recall wearing a denim wrap-around skirt similar to the one Byrne’s frustrated Sheila dons in the series. Here’s a story I did about the audacity of Byrne’s frequently unlikable character for Variety.