In Kylie’s case, she infamously denied getting lip filler for years despite obvious and sudden changes in her lip shape and size (she later said in an interview she regrets lying about that). In recent years, Khloé Kardashian has admitted to getting a nose job and Botox but has consistently denied having anything else done, even to her ever-changing body. One time, Allure straight-up asked Kim Kardashian what work she’d had done to her face; she said she had “a little bit of Botox” and no filler, ever. She denied getting so much as eyelash extensions.
But now that we’re getting a taste of what we’ve been begging for from the Kardashians for 15 years now, does it change anything? Does it help anyone outside of their family? If you ask me, not at all.
I’ve got mixed feelings about what, if anything, celebrities owe the public when it comes to transparency about how they achieve their appearances, but I tend to veer toward “that’s up to them, even if it goes against my personal morals.” Still, I understand why people crave transparency from the Kardashians specifically; I certainly did until a couple of years ago, when something inside me snapped and I simply ceased to care. In the 2010s, the Kardashian face quickly became the blueprint for today’s modern beauty standards (i.e. “Instagram face”)—and they used that blueprint to make a fucking killing.
As you know, the whole time Kylie was in her lip-filler-denial era, she was building a multi-million dollar cosmetic empire with Kylie Cosmetics Lip Kits, which she mostly promoted by wearing herself. Khloé, perpetually questioned about her denial of undergoing weight loss and other body-enhancement procedures, has sold tons of athleisure wear, hawked fitness supplements, and hosted a weight loss reality show called Revenge Body in 2017. When Kim denied having anything other than Botox in our interview, she was fresh off the launch of her skin care brand, SKKN By Kim.
So it’s more than fair for people to feel cheated by this family and the impossible beauty standard they not only created but positioned as attainable with products they just so happened to be selling. Although many if not most people could see through the bullshit, the business strategy clearly worked on us, if their million- and billion-dollar net worths are anything to go by. It was all exacerbated, of course, by unyielding media churn. Media outlets are what gave the Kardashians their spotlight in the first place, and the resulting exponential popularity created a cycle wherein any move they made provided major opportunities for clicks, magazine cover sales, and TV ratings—and that media coverage made them even more famous in turn, regardless of whether the engagement was coming from adoring fans or hate-clicks. The Kardashians were inescapable, whether people at home liked it or not.
