Earlier this week, Kylie Jenner ignited media and internet discourse with a full-throated admission of plastic surgery. Jenner shared the specs of her breast augmentation in response to a TikTok user inquiring about the details of her procedure, commenting, “445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!! silicone!!! garth fisher!!! hope this helps lol.”
Jenner’s comments have inspired influencers, aspiring influencers, and the chronically online to follow suit. For the past week, my TikTok and Instagram feeds have been dominated by high-angle videos of women walking in tank tops with their own augmented breasts front and center. One creator with nearly 40,000 followers posted a video walking alongside her Great Dane. “385cc (L) 415cc (R), Full Profile, Silicone, Gummy Bear, Over the muscle + Mesh Bra”, she wrote in white block letters superimposed over the video. She, like Jenner, ended the post by tagging her surgeon.
Jenner’s fame and success has always been linked to her appearance — or, more accurately, conversations about her appearance.
While Jenner has been praised for her honesty, her TikTok comment is much more akin to an internet trend than the beginnings of some sort of a transparency revolution.
Jenner’s fame and success has always been linked to her appearance — or, more accurately, conversations about her appearance. And there is no celebrity today that comes close to the level of influence the Kardashian-Jenner family has held in popular culture.
There was a time, not long ago, where such an admission was unimaginable coming from Jenner. Despite widespread speculation and cultural obsession about Jenner’s very obviously filler-enhanced lips, she vehemently denied any sort of injectable for years, pointing instead to how she did her makeup. The result was a shift in makeup trends, the launch of Jenner’s uber-successful makeup brand and, eventually, a normalization of lip filler. Whether you bought one of Kylie Cosmetic’s Lip Kits or not, in the mid-2010s everyone faked lip filler with over-lined lips and heavy matte lipsticks.
Jenner eventually admitted to receiving lip filler on an episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” only after turning the zeitgeisty conjecture about her lips into a successful marketing strategy for her brand. In an almost Orwellian move, she convinced a generation of young people not to believe what was visibly obvious — and instead, believe in the efficacy of the product she was shilling. And it worked. Jenner became, controversially, “the world’s youngest self-made billionaire at age 21.”
It is much easier to embrace honesty and transparency when you don’t have something to gain (say, a lot of money in sales) from obfuscating the truth.
Reflecting on Jenner’s recent post, I’m reminded of when Heidi Montag, the star of MTV’s seminal shows “The Hills” and “Laguna Beach,” admitted to a full-body plastic surgery workup on prime-time television. Then just 23, Montag wasn’t much older than Jenner is now when she sat on a couch with her mother and her sister and shared a list of her elective surgeries. At the time, Montag’s plastic surgery was received extremely poorly. She was harshly judged, of course, but she was also pitied. Her admission of plastic surgery wasn’t seen as powerful or honest, but as weak and vapid.
We’ve seen online discourse exhaustively and cyclically embrace and then condemn plastic surgery over the past decade or so. What these opinions often agree on is that plastic surgery is permanent and serious and should be treated as such. And what is so notable about Jenner’s TikTok post is how flippant it reads. The extensive use of exclamation points, internetese phrase “I hope this helps,” and a self-deprecating “lol” make the surgery feel very pedestrian and unremarkable.
Significant, too, is Jenner’s willingness to share who her surgeon is. Jenner’s mother, Kris Jenner, also recently admitted to a facelift and shared the name of her surgeon. I’m of two minds here. This could be seen as democratizing plastic surgery. Now regular people who might want a good facelift or Kylie Jenner-style breasts, should they be able to afford these expensive surgeries, know where to go to get them.
Beauty and perfection are attainable, for a price. This truth has been clear, but unspoken, since social media became a lucrative tool.
But this could also usher in an insidious new frontier of conspicuous consumption: plastic surgery. Like carrying a designer handbag or wearing a specific gold bracelet, you can now signal your wealth, status and access through your brand-name plastic surgeon. The levels with which this could negatively impact society are boundless.
I’m glad, in some respects, that Jenner’s embrace of her surgery can end the false and annoying notion that celebrities and influencers are more beautiful than the average person simply because they’re genetically blessed. Beauty and perfection are attainable, for a price. This truth has been clear, but unspoken, since social media became a lucrative tool for even the most mainstream brands.
But off the internet and away from Hollywood, our relationship with the truth is changing — and for worse, I believe. The current administration has irreparably damaged our relationship with facts, AI-doctored photos and videos have altered our understanding of reality, and social media has made hardship feel unacceptable. Plastic surgery has allowed our bodies, our flesh and our blood to be debated, used for tabloid fodder, and as marketing tools. Denying and then finally admitting to plastic surgery — once the stakes are not so high, the stigma is gone and the checks are cashed — isn’t a cause so much as it is a symptom.