"Jessica" is zipping down the Pacific Palisades Highway, gabbing on her car phone about her favorite topic: plastic surgery. Although her TV-production career is on hold until her kids are older, she is making a career, her friends quip, of talking about her nips and tucks and implants to anyone who will listen. Jessica is 45, but she doesn't look a day over 32, if she does say so herself, and she is happy to share the secret of her youthful appearance. She ticks off the procedures she's undergone as matter-of-factly as she would the repair history of her Jaguar: "upper and lower eye-lifts, forehead-lift, breast implants, hair implants, and teeth capping."

"Funny thing," says one of Jessica's friends, marveling at her frankness, "she's young, she's pretty, she has a good body, even before the operations, and she could have had some of this stuff done without people suspecting too much. But she's chosen to make it all well-known. Odd, isn't it?"

More and more women are confessing postoperatively (although denial is still the operative mode for leading ladies and anchorwomen). "Movie stars don't even admit they wear false eyelashes," says Linda Wayne, a Los Angeles costume designer, "but everyone else out here talks about their surgery all the time. I was at a fashion trunk show with total strangers, and everyone was talking about their doctors." While other people's surgery has always been fair game, now people who have been surgically refined (especially those in their 30s and 40s) are owning up to it rather than taking the Fifth. Simple openers like "You look wonderful—what did you do?" can turn an encounter with an old acquaintance on the powder-room line at the ballet into a surgery infomercial.

This openness didn't happen overnight. It has crept up on us. Carol Burnett had her chin augmented. Dolly Parton had breast implants. Joan Rivers metamorphoses before our eyes. A gossip columnist runs a blind item. Cher denies having had any ribs removed but admits having had her nose and her breasts refined. A glossy magazine prints before and after shots. People or some other fanzine gets the inside story. Before long, on Rolanda mothers-who-want-their-daughters-to-have-plastic-surgery are squabbling with daughters-who-don't, doctors are giving collagen injections live on Geraldo, and on Leeza the audience is treated to a videotape of a gossip reporter having a face-lift.

As a result, plastic surgeons, who had resigned themselves to being socially invisible-snubbed by patients pretending not to know them—are becoming the center of attention at parties. At a recent Beverly Hills benefit, a leading plastic surgeon could hardly eat his dinner, reports an assistant, "so many patients were coming over to greet him."

Nip-and-tuck disclosure is not just a West Coast phenomenon. Honesty is the policy of Park Avenue socialite Nan Kempner too. Plastic surgery is "no big deal," she says. "It's like having your toenails cut. If it's a good job, you should give credit to your doctor." She had a full face-lift nine years ago. "Now I go every year for a face-ical." she says with a throaty laugh at the word she invented, "the way others go for a physical. I go to darling Dan Baker and say, 'Are we ready?' He pulls here and he pulls there and says, 'Not yet.'" And she doesn't mind admitting, "I'm getting pretty due."

Is there anyone Kempner would not talk to about her surgical enhancement? Nope. No one. "I'd even discuss it on TV." There's only one drawback to yakking too much about it, Kempner says. "It's like having lovers. People think you've done it more often than you have."

The new frankness is Muzak to the ears of—and no surprise to—the folks who make wrinkle fillers. The Collagen Corporation, a major supplier of injectable collagen, recently unveiled the results of its own survey of 400 American women and their attitudes toward cosmetic surgery in a study titled "Redefining Vanity." "No longer are women declaring their moral superiority by wanting to age gracefully," wrote the author of the study, Stanford University social psychologist Debbie Then. "Women feel free to seek whatever cosmetic treatments [are available]... to help them look their best. This is the first generation of women to feel this way."

About half of the women polled had not had any cosmetic procedures, but a third of these said they'd consider having one—especially eyelid surgery, a face-lift, or collagen injections. Ninety-seven percent of the women interviewed agreed that cosmetic medical treatments are more acceptable today than they were 25 years ago, and that these treatments are not just for movie stars. Three out of four believe that vanity is not a dirty word. And nine out of ten women who had undergone a cosmetic procedure told someone about it.

In 1926 French doctor A. Noel, a pioneer in face-lifting, advised women meeting opposition from their husbands: "Have the operation performed and do not talk about it." It became customary for a woman to check into the hospital under an assumed name and to recuperate in seclusion, telling friends and even family that she was out of town. But that son of subterfuge is becoming as dated as helmet hair, and a growing number of women are doing without it. As Melanie Griffith proclaims in Revlon's ads for Age Defying Makeup, "Don't lie about your age. Defy it!"

Proud defiance may account for the fact that more and more plastic surgery patients are allowing their before and after pictures to be used by their doctors in marketing to prospective patients. "In the past, patients told me, 'Promise me one thing: You won't put my picture in your book.'" says plastic surgeon Andrew Ordon, who practices in Manhattan and Westport, Connecticut. "Now they say, 'Do I get to be in the book?' My nurse calls it our Hall of Fame."

Angie Dickinson, an established actress, is more ambivalent on the subject. In February she told a caller on The Charles Grodin Show that her beauty secret was "lots of good air and positive thinking—I'm a health food nut," only to contradict herself in the April issue of Vanity Fair: "I don't want to publish my plastic surgeon's name," she said, "but if people want to call me I would be happy to give it."

Trying to comprehend why anyone would want to confess her surgeries to more than her ten best friends, "Trudy," a public relations executive from Venice, California, wonders whether plastic surgery has become just another "status symbol, like having a Mercedes, living in Bel-Air, being the first on your block to go to Tahiti. We can't brag about furs and jewels anymore—it's not appropriate—so now it's OK to be obsessed with our bodies."

If plastic surgery were a status symbol, one would expect women to tell the whole truth about it, but frequently they don't. For instance, "no one ever uses the word face-lift." says Jessica, the woman who has made a career out of telling. "Face-lift is a passe word. It's an admission of wrinkles and aging." Instead, Jessica's circle uses a kind of shorthand. "They say, "I'm having my eyes done—which can mean anything from eyes to liposuction, cheek implants, peels, and, yes, face-lifts. "Of course, they are having face-lifts," says Jessica, "but they never say so."

Regardless of the euphemisms, they are talking about their face and body work. "It's the Oprah syndrome," says Robin Tolmach Lakoff, a University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor. The growing frankness about plastic surgery, she says, "is just one more sign that what it means to be a polite person is changing. Nice people used to hold things back. Now the notion is, nice people have no secrets. You see people on TV telling all kinds of unspeakable things and enjoying it, and getting a free trip to Chicago out of it."

But chitchat about plastic surgery may have an important function after all. In her 1991 paper, "Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches to Beauty," published in the feminist journal Hypatia, philosopher Kathy Davis points out that the decision to undergo surgery must be "struggled over. In view of the discomfort, expense, and potential side effects, deliberation is in order-research into the pros and cons, gathering information." Women may disapprove of cosmetic surgery and at the same time desire it, says Davis, and that's why many conversations start with "I know I shouldn't care about this, but..."

Some women use humor to hide how much they care. "My apartment looked better than my face, so I had my face done," one New Yorker joked to friends, equating her surgery with new slipcovers. Comedienne Julie Halston always gets a laugh when she does her schtick about charging her jaw surgery and chin implant on her Visa card: "I wanted the chin and the bonus points." When she stops making jokes, Halston talks about her receding chin, which had bothered her since she was a Long Island teenager. Success compounded her mortification when reviewers described her as "the rubber-faced comedienne." "It's wonderful to be funny and intelligent," she says, "but it is still painful to be very talented and not pretty."

Jessica considers her openness about her surgery a sort of social work. "You need support when you do these things." she says, "It's terrifying. You're sitting there waiting for surgery and you feel like an idiot. You're thinking, Here I am, perfectly fine, putting myself in an operating room, doing something voluntary and self-centered. Husbands may be sympathetic, but they have no idea what your looks mean to you and how you feel about this getting-older stuff."

Half a continent away, in Louisiana, a fiftyish southern belle echoes Jessica's attitude. Since her eye-lift at age 45 and her face-lift at 48, "Georgina," a retired retailer, has nudged many friends onto the operating table. For her, shepherding friends through this rite of passage—encouraging them, holding their hands, driving them the 100 miles to her surgeon in New Orleans—is almost a mission. "I was in a grocery store and ran into a friend from high school. I hadn't seen her in 25 years," says Georgina. "I could tell she'd had nothing done. She told me, 'I'm scared to death. I want my eyes done.'"

"She was giving me an opening," explains Georgina. "l told her. 'I've had the whole thing done. Have the whole thing done and you won't talk about it anymore.'"

But, as Houston writer Carol Barden discovered, one woman's new lease on life can be a dispossess notice to another who hides her aging neck under turtlenecks. Barden, 45, has talked about the eye- and face-lift she underwent three years ago to several hundred thousand people in articles she wrote for Lear's and Houston Metropolitan magazines. "I don't plop down next to someone on an airplane and tell plastic surgery stories," she says. "But if the subject comes up, I don't see any reason to keep my surgery secret." The subject came up at a recent charity luncheon in Houston, says Barden, and "a woman at my table was outraged at me, implying that women who have cosmetic surgery have emotional problems. This woman can't even do her own hair, but she felt superior to me."

As women scrutinize one another's faces for telltale signs of the knife, the polarization increases. The annoying thing about women who have had plastic surgery, says New York fashion designer Joan Vass, who has had none herself, is that "they are always telling you about their surgery and telling you what you need and offering to send you to their doctors."

But the greatest animosity is between those who have had surgery and talk about it and those who have had it and deny it. Outing—one of the most vicious forms of nip-and-tuck talk—is a blood sport among gossip columnists and comedians, Julie Halston considers celebrity deniers fair game.

Today Halston doesn't miss a chance to sock it to Raquel Welch, who is remarkably youthful looking for her age—a fact already remarked upon by Longevity and London's Daily Mail. (Welch's publicist denies the star has had plastic surgery.) Says Halston, "I see her a lot at social functions, and I want to say to her, 'Raquel, we grew up with you. We are right behind you on the caviar line. We see the scars behind your ears. Stop pretending!'"

TALKERS OF THE TOWN
Although it's been a very gradual process, some women are now as happy discussing their plastic surgery as they are their new hairstyles, their new lipstick shades, and their new shoes. Here, some very forthright revelations from the recently refigured.

DOLLY PARTON
I have had nips and tucks and trims and sucks, boobs and waist and butt and such, eyes and chin and back again, pills peels and other frills, and I'll never graduate from collagen."—from Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, her 1994 biography

ROSEANNE
"My face was so bad. I just looked like my dad, and I couldn't take that. Plus, it looks better on-camera, though I didn't do it to look glamorous and stay youthful. I just don't want to look in the mirror and see my parents. My body stuff was all about lifting things that fell."—Vanity Fair, February 1994

CAROL BURNETT
"'I heard about a form of oral surgery that could alter the line of my jaw. The procedure brought my jaw forward about four millimeters. After all these years I have a chin.'"—from Michael Maron's Instant Makeover Magic, by Michael Maron, 1983

JOAN RIVERS
"[Dr. Steven Hoefflin] thinned my nose, did a mini face-lift and a mini peel. We tweak it every couple of years."—Allure, May 1993

VIVA
"I hadn't realized how attached I was to my old nose. I looked [at my new one]. It was my old nose, only smaller, and without the bump."—Vanity Fair, September 1985