The original 'bone-smashing': How Old Hollywood icons reshaped their faces... and a plastic surgeon's stark warning on today's grisly trend

As the 'looksmaxxing' trend surges online, 'bone-smashing' has emerged as one of the most extreme measures people take to sculpt their features.

Young men have begun hitting their own faces with blunt objects in a bid to sharpen their cheekbones or enhance the definition of their jawlines.

But in the bygone days of Old Hollywood, it was the women who reshaped the skeletal structure of their faces in the relentless pursuit of beauty.

A young Marilyn Monroe overheard someone calling her a 'chinless wonder' and resorted to a grisly corrective revealed by medical records after her death.

Meanwhile, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford both got their world-famous cut-glass cheekbones by undergoing a brutal medical intervention.

Now the Daily Mail can expose the grim dedication of Golden Age screen goddesses to high-octane glamour, and exclusively reveal a plastic surgeon's urgent warning about today's gruesome tactic.

Marilyn Monroe

Shortly before her big break, the young actress Norma Jean Baker, who had been rechristened Marilyn Monroe, overheard her looks being insulted at a party.

She caught wind of someone describing her as a 'chinless wonder,' according to the book The Youth Doctors by Patrick McGrady.

The operation she consequently had to restructure her jawline only surfaced in her medical records half a century after she died.

The telltale documents had wound up in the office of Beverly Hills doctor Norman Leaf, the partner of the plastic surgeon she patronized near the end of her life.

It was Leaf who revealed in his memoirs that, at the dawn of her career, Monroe had cow cartilage grafted onto her jawbone to make it look stronger.

She postponed a screen test in order to recuperate from what she claimed was a fall that cut her chin, prompting the director to say, 'Honey, you should have cut your chin two years ago,' when he saw her.

Monroe's operation took place either in 1949 or 1950 - the latter being, of course, the year she appeared in her breakthrough role in All About Eve. 

The former 'chinless wonder' then shot to her stratospheric status as the most recognized sex symbol on the planet - her refashioned face the envy of millions of fans.

However, by July 1958, the month before she started filming Some Like It Hot, the bovine cartilage on her jaw was receding. She visited plastic surgeon Michael Gurdin for an evaluation, per a medical chart reviewed by Allure. 

The chart does not indicate whether she had another graft installed, a secret she never divulged before her death from an overdose four years later at age 36.

Joan Crawford

Joan Crawford's beauty captivated moviegoers around America, from her flashing eyes to her sumptuous lips and her artificially sharpened cheekbones.

Born Lucille LeSueur in San Antonio, Texas, in a year she managed to never disclose, she endured a hardscrabble upbringing at the dawn of the 20th century.

Young Crawford found herself pressed into forced labor and, according to a persistent rumor, lost her virginity at the age of 11 to her own stepfather.

The bleakness of her early life instilled in her a grinding drive to escape her circumstances and attain money and fame - and the looks required to get them.

Early in her showbiz career, she was so bent on having hollow cheeks that she submitted herself to the ordeal of having her back teeth yanked out of her head. 

One of the effects of the operation, however, was a gum infection that led to swelling inside her mouth, according to her biographer Shaun Considine, whose book formed the basis of the Ryan Murphy show Feud: Bette and Joan.

Even when the inflammation went down, her upper lip was fatter than it previously had been, giving her the opportunity to turn her illness to her advantage.

She added paint under her lower lip so that it would match the upper one, and in so doing created the illusion of what became known to fans as the 'Crawford mouth.'

Marlene Dietrich

Diehard Dietrich fans will have noticed how much softer her cheeks look in her star-making 1930 drama The Blue Angel - the first feature-length talkie in Germany - compared to her subsequent career as Hollywood's reigning femme fatale.

The Blue Angel's director, Josef von Sternberg, brought Dietrich to America and launched her career as Paramount's answer to MGM's Greta Garbo.

Dietrich's personal rivalry with Garbo extended to stealing one of her female lovers, and her professional drive to outshine her was no less intense.

Back in Berlin, Dietrich's gal pal Margo Lion - with whom she performed a comic lesbian duet on the Weimar cabaret scene - used to sing a solo number about aspiring to have 'sex appeal in the Garbo style.'

But it was Dietrich who succeeded in doing so, becoming a 'living legend' over the course of six Hollywood movies with Sternberg.

Sternberg himself came from a poor Viennese Jewish family and added the aristocratic 'von' to his name in America - a flourish of the same showbiz reinvention that animated his transformation of Dietrich.

In their films, he lit her thinning hair so flatteringly that she was rumored to have rubbed gold dust in it, according to the biography by her daughter Maria Riva.

Sternberg also shot her shapely legs with such ardor that they became world famous to the point Paramount took out a $1million insurance policy on them.

But lighting and camera work were evidently not enough for Dietrich to acquire the angular cheekbones that also became one of her calling cards.

The gold dust rumor was false, but a far more plausible and more enduring stream of speculation has held since the 1930s that she got her cheekbones defined by a similar method as Crawford - having her upper molars pulled.

Bone-Smashing

Now, as male beauty influencers like Clavicular have brought into bone-smashing, the Daily Mail can offer a stark warning from Dr Steven J Pearlman, a dual certified facial and reconstructive plastic surgeon in New York.

'Anything achieved from trauma will be temporary,' Pearlman said of bone-smashing, in an echo of the side-effects Crawford faced after tooth removal. 'And likely swelling will not look attractive.'

He did acknowledge, however, the desires that drive men to change their facial features.

'Classic masculinity is defined by a strong cheek bone, but also a stronger jawline,' he said. 'This is evident in all the old superhero comics, as well as the classic male movie stars going back many decades.'

Pearlman noted though that 'when these are exaggerated, it becomes threatening. The classic male villains had even bigger jaws, bigger cheekbones and more prominent foreheads. So it's about what looks natural and what displays good taste.'

He offered an alternate way for folks to alter their faces, saying that 'men too, can get subtle but enhancing changes with fillers or even facial plastic surgery.'

Pearlman also offered his expert view of the 'fascinating and frankly sobering' measures taken by the movie stars of years past in their pursuit of their beauty aims. 

In the case of Monroe's tactics, he remarked: 'From a surgical standpoint, bovine cartilage grafts carry significant risks including rejection, infection, and unpredictable resorption over time. The results would have been inconsistent at best.'

He added: 'As for extracting teeth to alter facial structure, the loss of posterior teeth can actually cause bone loss in the jaw over time, changing the facial profile in ways that become increasingly difficult to manage.'

The procedures that Old Hollywood stars availed themselves of were 'not refined techniques' but 'experimental interventions driven by industry pressure and very limited options,' Pearlman observed.

'Today, we have the knowledge, the tools, and the artistry to achieve beautifully refined facial results without compromising a patient's health or long term anatomy. Whether through precisely placed fillers, fat grafting, or facial plastic surgery, we can enhance the cheekbones, define the chin, and sculpt the jawline in ways that look completely natural and age gracefully,' he said.

'After 34 years in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, what I find most meaningful is that we no longer have to choose between looking beautiful and staying well,' he maintained.

'The extreme measures of the past were a product of limitation, not necessity, and it is important that we remember that context when we look back at those stories.'