Lindsay Lohan has lines in her forehead. She also has hair on her arms, knobby knees, a scaly elbow, and wears chipped nail polish. The 23-year-old Mean Girls star and tabloid fixture also has enormous pores.

You will learn this and more—much, much more—from the Huffington Post's new feature called The Big Picture, which the site's senior features editor Katherine Thomson describes in a brief intro as "unedited celebrity photos, blown up." The photo of Lohan was taken at an event called Rock the Kasbah on Monday night.

Mediaite's Joe Coscarelli offered a neutral assessment of the new feature, comparing it to the Boston Globe's similarly named Web feature and describing it as "Guaranteed to drive Web traffic. With this new feature, the Huffington Post wins with clicks, and the real losers are the makeup artists to the stars—now under more pressure than ever." (The Globe isn't the only site to offer high-resolution news images: The Wall Street Journal has Photo Journal; The Denver Post's site has Capture.)

The news value of this post is lost on some of the site's readers, who have made comments ranging from "Very dumb idea and totally a waste of bandwidth" to "I'm sure there's a point to this new 'feature,' but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is. Stop. Please just stop" and "New feature? Seriously? Why?" (It's worth noting the Huffington Post's commenters are not known for being a passive, polite lot.)

Asked for comment, the Huffington Post's editor, Roy Sekoff, sent the following statement via the site's spokesperson: "Big Pictures is a new entertainment feature we’re trying out. Our readers love pictures of celebrities, and this is another take on the celeb photo spread. Our entertainment editors look through posed, red-carpet pictures (not paparazzi photos) and decide which ones become Big Pictures. It’s a playful spin on our culture’s ongoing fascination with celebrity images. Two days in, reader reaction has been largely positive." (The spokesman would not say if Arianna Huffington herself signed off on The Big Picture.)

Playful or not, the Huffington Post has done this before. Last year, the site ran a similar post on its 'Media' vertical that depicted Vogue editor Anna Wintour headlined "Anna Wintour Up Close (Photos)," also posted by Thomson. While working at another publication, this reporter asked that site's proprietor and namesake, Arianna Huffington, about the post and received an explanation from editor Roy Sekoff: "I guess it's all in how you look at it. For me, I look at the Wintour pictures and think she looks great and exudes the kind of self-confidence and self-assurance that Arianna called 'the ultimate turn-on.'"

Others were less amused. Jezebel's Jessica Grose wrote, "Arianna Huffington, no spring chicken herself, should know better than to perpetrate girl-on-girl crime against another alpha female." (Grose is now with Slate's Double X.)

Asked to assess the newer post of Lohan, Chris Tarantino, a photo retoucher with 27 years of experience (17 of those in digital media) who specializes in "natural-looking skin," emailed Portfolio.com, "Someone was either trying to make a point with these shots or just applied the sharpening without double checking their work. Either way, sharpening is also considered editing. These have been sharpened so much that any and all detail is popping out, emphasizing the fact that Lindsay has wrinkles or larger pores." The original post calls the images used "unaltered." A Huffington Post spokesperson said the site's editors "don't do any retouching of the photos."

"The harshness that is shown here is probably nothing like the original captures," Tarantino speculated. "The wrinkles and pores would still be there but looking more like what you would see if you were just standing in front of her having a conversation."

Holly Stuart Hughes, editor of Photo District News, a trade publication for professional photographers published by Nielsen Business Media, told Portfolio.com, "I don't think it's really a photographic issue as much as a cultural question about our fascination with celebrity."

"Celebrity photos are a dime a dozen and can be found in so many places," she continued. "The Huffington Post is trying to lure readers with something. Nothing gets bounced around the Web like celebrities."