Good for Kylie Jenner! Celebrities should be honest about the surgeries and treatments they’ve had

I’m pleased that Jenner has been open about having had breast augmentation. Let’s hope it encourages others to do the same

So, Kylie Jenner had her breasts done. The 25-year-old reality TV star made the so-called “bombshell” revelation during the season three finale of The Kardashians. 

“Also, you know I got my breasts done before Stormi,” the beauty industry mogul told her friend, Anastasia “Stassie” Karanikolaou, referring to the five-year-old daughter she shares with rapper Travis Scott. “Within six months of like having Stormi, not thinking I would, like, have a child when I was 20, like they were still healing,” she continued. “I had beautiful breasts, like natural t**s, just gorgeous, like perfect size, perfect everything, and I just wished, obviously, I never got them done to begin with.”

To anyone familiar with Jenner, this admission probably won’t come as a surprise. After all, the Kylie Cosmetics founder spent years denying that she’d had lip fillers before launching her famous Kylie Lip Kits in 2015. Then in 2018, she did a complete U-turn and announced she’d removed all of her lip filler. A few months later, she started getting them back in again. 

Jenner has since been open about using fillers, telling Paper Magazine in 2019: “People think I fully went under the knife and completely reconstructed my face, which is completely false. I’m terrified! I would never. They don’t understand what good hair and makeup and, like, fillers, can really do. It’s fillers. I’m not denying that.” Reading those sentences now, of course, seems a little jarring; she later added: “I’m just embracing my natural beauty”.

Nobody should be judged for having plastic surgery or any other kind of “tweakment”, least of all women, who are far more harshly scrutinised than men for having work done. Several publications have already published articles speculating over everything else Jenner might have had done. But what I do think we need more of is transparency.

Like it or not, when it comes to what we socially accept as beautiful, celebrities are at the upper echelons. They are the ones that set and maintain the standards. The ones whose faces young women will spend hours poring over and comparing to their own. The ones that will inevitably make us feel drab by comparison, particularly if we’re feeling hungover or hormonal.

Hence why it rattles me that so few of them are upfront about the treatments they’ve had in order to look the way they do. Sure, there will be those who will naturally always look as if they’ve just returned from holiday and had 12 hours of sleep a night. And I’m sure there’s no limit to what you can do by investing in the highest quality skincare that a celebrity paycheck allows. 

But all it takes is a quick scroll through TikTok to raise one’s eyebrows. There are thousands of before and after photos featuring famous faces, with voiceovers listing all the possible things they’ve had done. It’s convincing stuff, particularly the videos shared by actual plastic surgeons. 

Recently, I had a long conversation about all this with a well-known writer who mixes in Hollywood circles: “Everyone in LA has had work done,” she told me. “And the ones you don’t think have, they’re all going to the same doctor. And he’s really, really good.” She proceeded to show me photographs of a famous actress she knows who recently had “the best nose job in the industry”.

There’s an argument that it’s sexist to expect women to divulge everything they’ve had done. And to an extent, I can understand that. Maybe it’s none of our business, anyway. But perhaps this gets more complicated when you consider those in the public eye who are regularly speaking about beauty standards but are also getting work done behind closed doors. I’m not going to name names, but if you go on TikTok, you’ll find some contenders pretty quickly.

If people are going to publicly pontificate about patriarchal structures, shouldn’t they be honest about the things they’ve done to uphold them? And if they aren’t, doesn’t that make them part of the problem? Because the more celebrities go under the knife, the higher our already impossible beauty standards become. Where does that leave us?

I’m pleased that Jenner has been open about having had breast augmentation. Let’s hope it encourages others to do the same.