Stacey Hoffman, 32, wasn't always a babe. Two years ago, when she drove her pickup truck into an auto-window-tinting shop owned by Kevin May in Lincoln, Neb., May, six years her senior, barely noticed her. Then an aide at a nearby nursing home and mired in a rocky, miserable relationship, Stacey weighed 180 lbs., deeply disliked the sight of her own face and didn't exactly radiate self-confidence. She didn't radiate much of anything, except perhaps a conviction that she looked 50 and would never be as happy or as attractive as Lisa, her bikini-contest-winning kid sister. The only detail May remembers about Stacey's visit to his shop that day is that she ordered a set of floor mats and never returned to pick them up.
In the period since that non-meeting, though, something happened--something out of a postmodern fairy tale that finally caused Kevin to pay attention and set Stacey's life on a fresh course. Thanks to the plastic surgeons, personal trainers, hair stylists and wardrobe consultants of the hit ABC TV series Extreme Makeover, homely Stacey became a raving beauty. After $18,000 worth of liposuction procedures, brow and eye lifts, Botox injections and dental work, Stacey went home to Nebraska from Hollywood an astonishing 35 lbs. lighter and looking like a newly minted pop star. In no time, her troublesome boyfriend was history and May, who glimpsed her again at a local street dance, was in hot pursuit. There were a few glitches, though: her 6-year-old niece Alexis failed to recognize her, and her co-workers at the nursing home resented her new image, she contends, and caused her to change jobs.
It has been more than a year since Stacey's transformation, time enough to assess its early consequences for her and those around her. Her story, like those of other recipients of Extreme Makeover's aesthetic magic, shows that when ugly ducklings become swans (particularly if surgery is involved) ruffled feathers can ensue, not to mention a fair amount of swelling--physical, emotional and social. In its desire to produce inspiring fables, the program plays down these complications, but they're real, and they raise important questions. Can human beings really change from the outside in? Does suddenly looking like a million bucks alienate those who can't afford to? And after the free limo ride is over, how easy is it to maintain a face and body granted by the whims of the TV gods?
"Everything about me was round. I just felt like a snowman," says Dan Restione, 41, a Seattle radio producer whose makeover last summer took six weeks and could have cost him an estimated $80,000 if he'd had to pay for it. For that kind of money, Dan deserved bionic superpowers, but what he got--a slimmed-down torso, a more prominent chin, sculpted cheeks, a fuller hairline, and teeth as white as Aspen after a blizzard--made him feel like an "action hero," he says, and lifted him out of a multiyear depression that had followed a divorce. If ever a man was ready for some superficial happiness, it was the teeth-grinding, chain-smoking Dan, who dubs his premakeover self the "king of cynics."