Jamie Lee Curtis condemns ‘genocide’ of women by plastic surgery industry

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ star said plastic surgery has led to ‘disfigurement’ of generations of women

Jamie Lee Curtis has condemned the plastic surgery industry’s “disfiguration” of women, likening its impact to “genocide”.

For a new interview with The Guardian, the 66-year-old Everything Everywhere All at Once star brought a set of enlarged, red plastic lips as a prop to the photoshoot, telling journalist Emma Brockes it was her “statement against plastic surgery”. Curtis posed in the article wearing the lips over her own.

She said of the statement: “I’ve been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who’ve disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.”

When questioned whether “genocide” was the appropriate word to use in the context of plastic surgery, Curtis said she thinks it’s accurate.

“I’ve used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it’s a strong word,” she said. “I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there’s a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances.”

Curtis added that the popularisation of plastic surgery in recent years has been “aided and abetted by AI”, with the accessibility of interactive facial filters.

“The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it’s hard not to go: ‘Oh, well that looks better.’ But what’s better? Better is fake. And there are too many examples – I will not name them – but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.”

Curtis, the child of late Hollywood actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, said that she watched her parents’ careers decline after their youthful looks began to wane.

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As a result, Curtis said she has been “self-retiring for 30 years” so she can “leave the party before I’m no longer invited”.

“I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age,” she said. “I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that’s very painful.”

Curtis has long been vocal about the pressures for young women in Hollywood to receive plastic surgery to stay employed, having undergone a procedure herself, aged 25, as a result of a cinematographer’s comments about her “baggy” eyes.

She spoke about her regret after the procedure, telling CBS’s 60 Minutes: “That’s just not what you want to do when you’re 25 or 26. And I regretted it immediately and have kind of sort of regretted it since.”

“I’ve become a really public advocate to say to women you’re gorgeous and you’re perfect the way you are. So yeah, it was not a good thing for me to do.”