A few mornings ago, I was following my routine like normal. I checked several of my favorite gossip outlets, then began looking through the new photos. I clicked on the set for the “New Yorkers for Children” benefit, just to see if anyone interesting had attended. These Crystal Renn photos attacked me! I was unprepared for her transformation – and I barely registered Crystal Renn normally. I knew her as “that former plus-sized model who lost weight and was now kind of an interchangeable brunette.” And now she’s… THIS. This odd, alien-like blonde creature with what appears to be super-bleached eyebrows. Full disclosure: I thought she had simply shaved off her eyebrows at first, but no, she just bleached the crap out of them. So, was Renn’s “transformation” part of something bigger? Was it a dare gone awry? Is this a new “statement” of where fashion is going? Crystal explained herself to People Magazine:
Crystal Renn has experienced every side of the modeling business, from runway to plus-size gigs to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. But fans of the fashion veteran may no longer recognize her. The former plus size model — who these days, is booking mainstream jobs — recently dyed her hair (and eyebrows) platinum blonde for an extreme image overhaul.
“People can’t believe the transformation. I had black hair and now I have white hair,” Renn tells PEOPLE. “That’s what’s so exciting. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to show up as a different canvas at a shoot. It’s a very extreme look but very beautiful. Though it’s nothing conventional.”
After undergoing multiple dying sessions to bring her hair color from mahogany to icy blonde, Renn admits, “It’s a challenging look. But what’s wonderful is it’s something that photographs beautifully.”
In fact, she’s already done one photo shoot as a tragic Marilyn Monroe figure, but Renn says she’s not going for the blonde beach babe vibe.
“I’m not trying to conform to one certain look,” she says. “I look up to someone like Tilda Swinton. She’s the fashion icon. She experiments and that keeps life fun.”
[From People]
I don’t care for the way she’s kissing her own ass – “It’s a very extreme look but very beautiful. Though it’s nothing conventional…It’s a challenging look. But what’s wonderful is it’s something that photographs beautifully.” Girl, you look like Brigitte Nielsen on a bad day! I mean, I understand that this look is “editorial,” and while I don’t find it beautiful, my eye is drawn to her, so this helps her stand out. Also, it totally beats Crystal spending yet another interview defending her weight loss. I’d rather her talk about her crazy hair than have her talk about her weight. Maybe in the weeks to come, she’ll figure out a happy-medium on the brows, though. Because only Tilda Swinton can pull off the “magnificent alien” look.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
that’s…awful
Noooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! 🙁
IKR! I don’t know what her hair colorist or friends were smoking when they decided on this look. It makes her look like an aging heroin addict. That ugly Zac Posen dress does not help either. I do like the shrubbery on the shoulders though.
Fugly either way.
She was so much prettier plus size. She seems like a coked out nut now.
I remember her saying she was happier as plus size. I agree, her face was much more attractive with weight on it.
Her transformation is so alarming- mostly with her facial features. Very sad. She was attractive before all of this.
She used to have some gorgeous curves and her face was lovely with weight on it.
She looks like an RSPCA neglected horse advert now.
Also, “plus sized model”? I call that a normal sized woman myself. I’d like to introduce fashion to reality.
She doesn’t really look good, she can’t work that look, it doesn’t suit her. It’s going to be a hell to upkeep too. To be “that extreme” works for some but for her, it seems all too try-hard. I guess she just got seriously tired of being the xl-model with not so super editorial looks – “too normal”.
The hair alone might have worked, but the girl needs her brows.
Why is she so shiny? That’s all I can see.
Obviously she’s beautiful naturally, so why is doing this?
It looks like something Tyra would do to one of the girls on ANTM in order to make them loose their mind!
I keep wondering about the shiny look took! So many celebs walk around with the shinyness and it’s so unflattering. They look like they’re sweating out their liquor from the night before.
ITA about the Tyra thing. I swear she picks horrendous looks JUST to evoke a nervous breakdown from someone, calling it ‘edgy’…. As if the makeovers are incomplete without someone crying in the corner over a busted weave or bleach burns. I myself can’t stop looking at the bad spray tan now all I see is shiny bad tan. She used to be so pretty….
Her skin is really bad..
You ain’t no Tilda, sweetheart.
^
No one can out-alien THE SWINTON.
You are the 1st person who said what I have always thought about Tilda!
Thank you!!!
Everyone else I know adores her, but I just do not get her.
The shine is botoxshine. Botox gives a certain typical shine to the skin and you can’t powder over it completely, especially under these strong lights, it will shine through the makeup.
Besides the hair, I wouldn’t feel some type of way if I didn’t think the only reason you became a plus sized model was because you were a dime a dozen skinny and now that you’re successful you’re back to starving.
someone needs some filler on her () lines
Wearing her crazy on the outside now. Sad.
That’s not really a dude? She’s really rough-looking. She’s supposed to be a model?
Man, some women on here can be mean. I think she photographs beautifully no matter her size, and if she is comfortable enough to pull this look off then so what.
@Hithere- She looks like she’s wearing that HD powder and under certain lighting it looks funky.
I wish women would be more encouraging of eachother. But that’s probably asking for too much.
She needs to keep changing her look because she is a horrible model. Her idea of modeling is parting her lips ever so slightly in every shot.
She looks like Tyra Banks gave her a makeover.Every year on Top Model someone gets the yellow weave (or dye job) of doom and the bleached out eyebrows.
She’s kind of ugly either way.
Good for her if she’s happy looking this way but I think she looked better with some weight on her and her dark hair this plus size celebrities eventually give in and start loosing weight Adele is next you just watch.
I don’t understand. I remember years ago when she talked about how some talent scout told her that she would have to lose 80 lbs in order to get work. She talked about starving herself, how she exercised constantly, how her hair was falling out and eventually losing work because of the decline in her looks, personality and health that followed. She ended up in the hospital because she went into renal failure and how she couldn’t be happy, healthy, attractive or employable until she received treatment and her body found homeostasis…this was in her ‘plus-sized’ body.
Frankly, I hadn’t ever heard of her until after her ordeal. You could so plainly see in her thin pictures how miserable, weak and wan she looked. It was such a huge difference to that girl and compare her to refreshed and confident girl who became admired by Jean-Paul Gauthier (only after the weight gain) and the smiles on both of their faces as they bounced down the runway.
I don’t know how old she is, I think she’s in her mid-twenties. For what it’s worth, if she decided to do all of this to herself again, there must have been some intense professional pressure behind it because there is no way that anyone could say she looks better at this thin size. Maybe she couldn’t get away with being the token padded muse anymore and saw the industry move on without her.
I guess one designer and one model can’t really make a difference. Yves St. Laurent was the first designer to ever hire black models (and not just one here and there to cynically placate a community, he thought *gasp* that there was true and derserving beauty there, not blank canvases on whom a political treatise could be written) to work runways in Paris. The fashionistas were scandalized by this in 1963 and as predicted, as his public profile decreased, so too did the presence of anything not WASP-related.
50 years later, what’s changed? We get the odd token to shut us up and return to conducting our progress through the meadows of the sacred blondes. 50 years later, I ask: do you minority ladies feel like you are valued aesthetically to a level equal to that of caucasian women, or must we take a sojourn to Roscoe’s Bleaching and Rhinoplasty to even get a wearied sideways glance from ‘Big Patriarchy’?*
I don’t even know if there’s a true future for the ‘plus-sized’, since runway models are just the prop onto which the designs are draped. What else moves the clothes around whilst never compromising the purity of it by creating a bunch of superfluous bumps and curves that distract?
*My gratitude goes to noted thinker Ashley Judd L.C.B.O, A.S.P.C.A, G.C.B. Esq. for allowing me to hegemonically appropriate the othering heteroglossia of synedoche’s continental shift, which is truly the vaginal dentata of a Pangaean cross-cultural intersections of the monstrous feminine so elegantly reified in the tradition of Anne Sexton’s meditations on a Plathian gas pilot light. I too ask: Schroedinger’s cat, or Montaigne’s cat? You be the Adorno.
umm, I was with you in the beginning of the rant and I lost you towards the end… especially the “noted thinker Ashley Judd” thing going on… She’s not the first woman in the world to point out the patriarchy of white America, but I guess it’s cool that she points it through media outlets. Whatev.
With that being said, as a young “attractive” (at least my husband thinks so!) educated Hispanic woman, I don’t think that white America thinks a beautiful minority woman is just as pretty as a blonde Caucasian woman of the same age group (I think Selena Gomez vs. Jlaw type of comparison, face only). And if they do, it’s usually because the minority women have white features, naturally.
So, I guess I get what you are saying, just not the way you said it. Plus I give American peeps more credit. Beauty here is in all colors of the rainbow, and change is happening slowly but surely
I’m pretty sure Jo’s last paragraph was pure sarcasm.
she’s still sucking in her cheeks (it was evident in previous photos) but did she lose even more weight, or does it look like she did because she got a tan?
I don’t know- she’s got a Kristin McMenamy vibe going on. One of your more “out there” fashion photographers might be able to do something with this look, but it doesn’t translate well to the red carpet.
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
She should have just shaved the eyebrows.
Seaweed.
I guess I’m the only one, but I like the look on her. I never saw her as a plus-size model, though.
OMG what the crap did she do to herself. Star the countdown because this girl is on some drugs.
She looks like Tilda Swinton’s little sister from another mother.
Either way, ugly as sh!t!
Overrated.