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If we were to tell you that a marketing research firm dedicated considerable resources to determining the values of 46 discrete personality attributes for nearly three thousand celebrities, and that one of the categories their study sought to measure was "overexposure," we'd wager that you could rattle off with hardly any effort at least ten of the top 12 scorers. (We'd never ask you to actually follow through on this exercise, but should you get the urge to sacrifice no more than five neurons to this test of mental rigor, be our guest.) In their story on this breakthrough scientific examination of exactly how sick we are of seeing the same dozen or so famous faces over and over again, Forbes examines the test case presented by Jessica Simpson (#12, 41% overexposure rating), who progressed from the humble beginnings of Britney Spears (#2, 62%) clonedom to the kind of recent ubiquity that makes it all but impossible to crack open a fortune cookie without seeing her image alongside a Confucian aphorism altered to relate to the dropping of her latest album:

"To date, [MTV's] Newlyweds is her magnum opus," says [Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University quote whore Robert] Thompson. "Jessica Simpson is probably not going to be one of these stars that continues to be a star from generation to generation."

Deadpans media image consultant Michael Sands: "I don't think she's a Meryl Streep. I think her cache is that she's more popular in the tabloids."

Then again, some stars only exist because of media ubiquity, notes Star magazine's Bonnie Fuller, American Media's chief editorial director.

"For somebody who is less talented, it can often give them a career that they wouldn't have had at all," she says. "It may not last for that long, but it does give them something for a while."

Now that we've all briefly contemplated Simpson's unearned attention-to-talent level, we now return you to our regularly scheduled coverage of the personalities Hollywood is happily jamming down our collective throat, which will almost certainly include overexposure-boosting references to Paris Hilton (#1, 66%), Lindsay Lohan (#6, 47%), and Tom Cruise (#7, 47%) by the end of the day.