Jocelyn Wildenstein’s face is synonymous with bad plastic surgery, she’s a living breathing meme. I know it’s bad to point and laugh but as long as you’re sat behind a computer a couple of thousand miles away it ain’t so bad I suppose. And seriously, what has she done to her face?

Today I came across one of the many images of her looking weird on the web and I wondered to myself (I’ve been feeling very reflective today), what brought her to this sad state of affairs? I mean, you don’t wake up one day and go “I’m going to completely ruin my face permanently” do you?

So I had a look into her past to see if I could use some Poirot style insights to diagnose her issues. It turns out I didn’t need to use any of my psychology A-Level book smarts to work this one out though.

Wildenstein’s only claim to fame now is that she’s regarded as a socialite (i.e. someone with more money than sense that’s proud of having loads of money and no sense). She once claimed to have spent $60,000 on a year’s phone bill and $547,000 on food and wine in a 12 month period. Basically she’s got nothing better to do than spend. But there’s more to this story than meets the eye. So here’s a brief summary of the events that led to the face of faces.

Jocelyn Wildenstein’s life began as Jocelyn Périsset in a middle-class family in Switzerland. Whilst growing up in Switzerland she became an expert hunter and an able pilot. During a trip to Africa she fell head over heels in love with Alec Wildenstein at his personal ranch in Kenya. She was introduced to the dashing gent by a Saudi arms dealer called Adnan Khashoggi. (That’s an irrelevant detail but I enjoyed typing out his name so it’s staying in).

The pair married in 1978 but it sounds like Alec was a bit of a dick and their relationship was never much fun. Jocelyn fell in love with the local big cats and the luxurious lifestyle but other than that it seems like it was a pretty rubbish time. Alec treated her badly and slept with other women whilst she desperately and unsuccessfully attempted to win back his affection.

As Jocelyn approached 50 she became more and more desperate to win his heart once more. She did the only thing left that she could think of — she succumbed to the surgeon’s knife. Apparently the first surgeries went well and the spark was momentarily fanned into a romantic flame between the stagnated lovers.

It wasn’t to last though. Alec’s roving eye soon became apparent again and Jocelyn became ever more desperate to please. She knew that Alec loved the big cats in his enclosure more than anything else in the Universe, so she went back to the plastic surgeon with an odd request. She wanted to look more like a big cat. That seems like a pretty mad decision to me, but at that place and time it clearly made sense in Jocelyn’s mind.

Alec’s reaction to her surgery wasn’t quite what she’d hoped for…

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