Kylie Jenner and Khloe Kardashian are talking about the work they’ve had done. But is radical transparency around this helpful?
Have you ever wondered what kind of cosmetic surgeries the Kardashians and Jenners have had? They’ll go one further and tell you not only what they had done, but why and who did it.
Kris Jenner dropped the name of her cosmetic surgeon, while her daughter Kylie made a now-deleted Instagram comment about the details of her breast augmentation.
But is radical transparency around plastic surgery going to help set more realistic beauty standards?
“On the one hand, this could have a very protective effect by people realizing that comparisons are not appropriate, that people don’t actually look like that naturally, and that people don’t age like that,” said Rachel Rodgers, an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University. “However, my suspicion is that the effect is probably going to go the other way.”
Instead, celebrities offering the exact “recipe” for how they got their appearance might inspire people to go to their surgeon to request the same, hoping for a similar look.
“It may not give the same results, but it probably will participate in this converging aesthetic,” said Rodgers, who studies the socio-cultural influences on body image and eating concerns. “It’s likely that the disappointment will be in that it hasn’t produced the psychological and social results that people were looking for.”
It’s no surprise that members of the blended Kardashian and Jenner clan have had plastic surgery, said Rodgers. But the recent level of honesty they have in disclosing it is new.
Not only did Kylie Jenner share the exact type of breast augmentation she had and the doctor (silicone implants, moderate profile, half under the muscle with Garth Fisher), but her sister Khloe Kardashian recently outlined all her surgeries in an Instagram comment, from her nose job to her salmon sperm facials.
Kardashian makes a point that her look is not just plastic surgery. While full-on cosmetic procedures are on the rise, so are minimally invasive ones like Botox and fillers. Rodgers said this may be in part due to how minimally invasive some of these procedures are and how they can easily be accessed.
Many medical offices offer these services and for a low cost, Rodgers added. As celebrities talk about their specific work, Rodgers said it’s likely some practitioners will capitalize on this as a way to advertise what they can do, further enticing people to go under the knife or needle.
But while this conversation normalizes treatment, it may not be for the better.
“It’s very dangerous, personally, not only from a physical health standpoint, because things can go wrong, but also from a psychological and a social perspective,” Rodgers said. “People are being marketed that they need to engage in what essentially are medical procedures, even if they’re sold in sort of this fluffy, ‘let’s have a Botox party’ casing. To me, this is a very detrimental trend.”
“This is particularly unfortunate because most of the people who obtain these procedures are women, and that it’s just generally adding to the number of ways in which women are expected to spend their time and money in order to curate their appearance to some unrealistic standard,” she added.
Rather than speaking out about their surgery, Rodgers said she’d rather see celebrities resist the urge to get any work done, as well as regulation around the advertising and administration of cosmetic procedures.
“A better thing would be for celebrities to resist the pressure and to be transparent about that,” she said. “I would love to hear people speaking out about the fact they have not had this work done and why, I think the reality is a larger cultural shift (is needed). That’s incredibly difficult, because for somebody who works in an industry that is almost entirely appearance-based, it may end up being a choice between your career or not. More broadly, if the entertainment industry could feature more older people across the board who actually look older, that would be very helpful, for a start.”