Mother Jones illustration; Noam Galai/GC/Getty
“445cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!! silicone!!! garth fisher!!! hope this helps lol.”
With an “lol” and a disarming number of exclamations, the comment, a response to a TikTok plea for boob job details, seemed to exude a breezy insouciance. But coming from Kylie Jenner, the celebrity billionaire and youngest of the Kardashian-Jenner family, the response was anything but casual. “I’m going to give Jenner her props,” a Harper’s Bazaar editor wrote last week, before going on to describe the moment as barrier-breaking: “I’m not sure a celebrity of her stature has ever spilled about plastic surgery in such fine detail.” Across the internet, Jenner was now being celebrated as the “ultimate girl’s girl” for no longer seeking to “gatekeep” the specifics of her boob job.
Under what delusion have we been sitting on a mountain of disposable income that can now be gloriously unleashed to undergo the same cosmetic procedures as a celebrity billionaire?
The very act of a celebrity commenting on social media is designed to feel casual, dissolving the distance between the elite and pleb. But the most basic knowledge of the Kardashian-Jenner media empire is to know that it started and subsists on the implicit agreement that nothing we see about them is truly real. Nearly every public action, which includes social media activity, is filtered through a lens that prioritizes the family’s financial enrichment. So it seems far from coincidence that mere weeks before Kylie’s revelation, that “momager” and matriarch Kris Jenner stepped out in Paris to reveal a stark transformation of her own.
A rep for Kris confirmed that a procedure had taken place, and like Kylie, shared the name of the doctor who performed it. Fans have since mistaken Kris for her 29-year-old daughter, the model Kendall Jenner.
After years of denial, why the sudden candor? It’s easy to suspect that the woman who works harder than the devil sees something to monetize. (The Cut cheekily guessed that a plastic surgery platform may be in the works.) As Meredith Jones, a professor at Brunel University of London and host of The Beauty Chronicles, tells me, it is “about audience, numbers, clicks,” and seeing less advantage in pretending nothing has been done while cashing in on what once was only available to movie stars and the superrich.
“It’s an extremely curated form of candor: managed, marketed, and planned carefully,” Jones told me over Zoom. “This is where the Kardashians are geniuses in reading the Zeitgeist and having the exact balance of candor and secrecy. Many people will follow their lead.”
Yet, there is something absurd about the praise that this newfound openness has sparked. Particularly vexing is the praise that Kylie is no longer a “gatekeeper.” Have some of us been sitting on a mountain of disposable income that can now be gloriously unleashed to pursue the same cosmetic procedures as a celebrity billionaire? The reality is that even if one were willing to crack open 401Ks or incur significant debt, they would still struggle to access someone like Dr. Garth Fisher, whose Beverly Hills office has reportedly been inundated with calls since Kylie’s post. But for the Kardashian-Jenners, it’s about selling the promise, Jones tells me, that one day we can achieve the same look.
If money were not an issue, the race to boob singularity would be underway. But Kylie herself once seemed to suggest a different path.
Let’s imagine, though, that we do enjoy unfettered access to capital and in-demand surgeons. What would happen to our boobs? As I wrote in a recent piece, we already know the consequences of digital trends dictating real-life beauty standards; it is occurring on our cheeks and lips, creating an unsettling homogeneity. Our boobs, judging by the enthusiastic reception to Jenner’s post, could take a similar, ballooning trajectory.
But Kylie herself once seemed to suggest a different path.
“I wish I could be her and do it all differently because I wouldn’t touch anything,” she said, referring to her young daughter on a 2023 episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
It was the first time that Kylie had publicly expressed regret for undergoing breast augmentation at 19, a procedure she had spent years denying. Even a skeptic would be hard–pressed to ignore the simple humanity in the scene.
This is what I keep returning to as the internet now lavishes praise for Jenner as the ultimate girl’s girl. I can’t help but feel a touch of disappointment. Kylie Jenner understands that for so many, her supposed candor amounts to a massive stamp of approval for something she has explicitly expressed regret over. Maybe gatekeeping isn’t so bad, after all.
