What happened to Ashley Judd's face? Though the actress has been out of the spotlight for a few years, fans know that Ashley Judd is one of Hollywood's most stunning natural beauties.

However, the actress was nearly unrecognizable when she appeared on a Canadian talk show to promote her new television series "Missing."

"It looks weirdly puffy but she doesn't appear to have gained weight," one Ashley Judd fan messaged on "Twitter" regarding the 43-year-old actress' face. Like Lindsay Lohan, the actress is alleged to be using injectable fillers in an attempt to look as youthful as possible for her big career comeback.

"As we age, we lose fullness in our face. Fillers can reverse it," a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon tells Us Weekly.

Many people in the media and the public have been speculating lately about how Ashley Judd is losing her looks as she ages.

"She ruined her face with plastic surgery, or Botox, or something similar," the online world crowed as they went overdrive recently on one of Judd's TV appearances.

Now normally, Judd would have ignored all of this. The actress said that she has stopped reading about herself in the media including the flattering stuff. However, she was called a cow, a pig and was even warned that the actress "better watch out because her husband is looking for a second wife."

However, when the cruelty started coming from professional colleagues, Judd has decided that she needed to address the issue and that it could no longer be ignored.

Judd penned an elegant, impassioned and meticulously crafted article for the "Daily Beast" that bashed the media and the public for sexist and ageist attacks that try to belittle women and equate their worth with their looks.

"I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle," the actress wrote.

The assault on Judd comes at a time when it has been seemingly declared open season on women's body size. Songbird Adele has been criticized for her full figure. The woman of the hour, Jennifer Lawrence, the star of the mega hit "Hunger Games" finds herself defending her womanly curves.

Also, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition cover model Kate Upton has been called too big and told she would never warrant a spot on the Victoria's Secret runway.

The worst offenders, suggested Judd, are women themselves. "That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient," the Harvard-educated Judd wrote in the piece, which has been skyrocketing around the Internet, making her name one of the most searched for terms on Google.

Judd says that her puffy face was the result of a persistent sinus infection that required several rounds of steroids, which in turn led to the bloated appearance. When the actress is not starring in films or TV shows like her new ABC drama "Missing," Judd is active in humanitarian and philanthropic works and travels the globe fighting poverty, illness and AIDS.