- - Everyone's talking about their facelift. Where does that leave the rest of us?

Erika W. SmithDecember 30, 2025 at 6:00 AM

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Illustration: Sean Dong for Yahoo News

Kylie Jenner got 445 cc, moderate profile, silicone, half under the muscle. Simone Biles got 310 cc, high profile, silicone, under the muscle. Alix Earle got 275 cc in one, 295 cc in the other, saline, under the muscle. These strings of numbers and phrases aren't a secret code; they're the sizes of celebs' breast augmentation procedures, which they all chose to share publicly in the last year.

It's not just breast implants that stars have revealed. Kris Jenner's facelift went viral thanks to photos of her looking eerily younger, so much so that the name of her plastic surgeon is now widely known. Former Real Housewives stars Jacqueline Laurita and Lynne Curtin got facelifts together and documented the experience on social media. And current Real Housewives star Heather Gay told Bustle that she's had approximately $200,000 worth of work done, including two nose jobs, a blepharoplasty for her eyelids, and a "mommy makeover."

2025 wasn’t just the year that celebrities got work done — it’s the year they couldn't stop talking about it.

This new era of uber-transparency might look a lot like progress: After all, acknowledging cosmetic surgery is a lot more honest than pretending a nose job is the result of drinking endless gallons of lemon juice and eating Japanese sweet potatoes. Yet honesty alone can’t dismantle a beauty system built on endless optimization, in pursuit of a look that changes with the times and seems to be forever eluding women. If anything, as celebrities and influencers share more of their work, the distance between their surgically curated appearances and everyone else’s can grow wider and feel more jarring. Does this new openness actually signal a healthier beauty culture — or a more punishing one?

A different flavor of unrealistic expectations

Cosmetic surgery has become more common in recent years: One study showed a 40% global increase in procedures performed by plastic surgeons from 2019 to 2023. The people who get cosmetic surgery are also trending younger; a 2025 study identified a 13.6% rise in facial plastic surgery among patients younger than 30 from 2018 to 2021. That means the usual stigma against cosmetic surgery is also abating — at least when the results are deemed desirable. Internet commenters can be quite cruel about “botched” or obvious work.

After all, acknowledging cosmetic surgery is a lot more honest than pretending a nose job is the result of drinking endless gallons of lemon juice and eating Japanese sweet potatoes.

Don’t expect the wave of admissions about cosmetic procedures — from celebs, from influencers or even from your coworker — to fade anytime soon. "Moving forward, I think many more celebrities will probably be much more open about their experiences with plastic surgery and even who they've had plastic surgery with," Miami-based plastic surgeon Dr. Alexander Zuriarrain tells Yahoo. "They just post so much about their personal life that it's hard to hide and then come back with a totally different look and say that it was a natural transformation."

For decades, the de facto way celebs revealed cosmetic surgery transformations was to avoid cameras for a while and then talk about their new diet or gua sha habit — a practice that beauty critics argued led to unrealistic expectations. Getting 10 hours of sleep a night is, after all, not going to make your nose any smaller.

"The fact that so many continue to lie and deny proves that there is still a deep cultural belief that 'natural' beauty is a moral achievement and that there is a shame inherent in changing your face in an 'artificial' manner," Ellen Atlanta wrote for Dazed in late 2024. "When celebrities deny beauty work, they often attribute their transformations to moralistic lifestyle changes or natural bodily phenomena such as periods, pregnancy or illness. This framing suggests an almost fairytale narrative that physical beauty is a reward for good behaviour."

But what about when celebrities do reveal the ins and outs of their physical transformation, including the name of their surgeon and the price they paid? Zuriarrain says that the problem of unrealistic expectations doesn't entirely go away.

There’s of course the cost to think about; plastic surgery procedures (as opposed to injectables like Botox) cost at least thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you can afford it and are willing to undergo the same procedure as your favorite celeb — which can involve painful recoveries and lasting side effects — there’s also the matter of all the other upkeep required. "Patients aren't doing what all these celebrities are doing when they're not having surgery in terms of private chefs, private fitness instructors, home gyms, IV therapy, all of these wellness services," Zuriarrain says.

Be a girl’s girl — drop the name of your surgeon

Many of the celebs who have dropped their cosmetic surgery details have been cheered on by commenters applauding them for their openness. "this is why she’s for the girls 🩷 love u thank u," wrote the TikToker who initially asked Kylie Jenner for her breast augmentation details on TikTok.

Disclosures, whether from celebrities or content creators, can also help people who already know they want to get cosmetic surgery choose a procedure and surgeon. Hannah Mayuski, a content creator who works in marketing in the aesthetic industry, documented her experience getting "the Kylie Jenner technique" on TikTok. She tells Yahoo she had already decided to get a breast augmentation in anticipation of her 30th birthday, and she came across the details of Jenner's surgery while researching different techniques.

Being primed from social media — and all the chatter about other people’s procedures — helped her to have candid conversations with her surgeon. Maysuki decided to document her own breast augmentation in part because there was so little information available online about plastic surgeons in Atlanta, where she lives. "I was like, 'I feel like it would be helpful to hear from a regular girl that just wants to get some work done,'" she says.

Others also point out that being honest about plastic surgery can debunk dangerous speculation about why a certain celebrity’s appearance changed. Andie Zuzarte, a singer and gymnast, applauded Biles with a TikTok video with text reading, "thinking I couldn't respect Simone Biles anymore but then she got on the internet and talked openly about her plastic surgery instead of letting young girls who look up to her get complexes about their bodies." She tells Yahoo that Biles's disclosure helps debunk the myth that elite gymnasts don't go through puberty, a myth that contributes to high rates of eating disorders among gymnasts.

"There are very harmful rumors or myths that gymnastics suppresses puberty, and then once you quit gymnastics, you're all of a sudden going to go through puberty and get boobs," Zuzarte says. "I think that if she hadn't talked about it, people may have thought that's what happened. And it's actually very dangerous for young girls to think, 'If I get my period, gymnastics is over for me,' because it's not healthy at all to be 17 or 18 and not get your period because your body weight is so low." She concludes, "[Biles] was a healthy, full-grown woman competing in the Olympics. And now she's a healthy, full-grown woman who has also had a breast augmentation."

The pursuit of perfection

Beauty standards are a fact of living in any society — they’ve always been around and always exerted a psychological pull on women to conform or pay the price. So the fundamental question becomes if our new era of transparency — talking honestly about the money, pain and effort it really takes to hew to an ideal — ultimately benefits the average non-celeb.

Several studies suggest that seeing plastic surgery everywhere online at least increases acceptance and appetite for it. A 2019 study found that viewing images of women who had undergone cosmetic enhancements increased young women’s desire for it, especially if they spent significant time on social media and were already less satisfied with their appearance. A 2024 systematic review of 25 studies reached a similar conclusion: "When celebrities undergo cosmetic procedures and publicly share their experiences and results, they normalize these practices and make them more desirable to the public."

Indeed, S. Heijin Lee, assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Hawaii and author of the forthcoming book The Geopolitics of Beauty: Transnational Circulations of Plastic Surgery, Pop, and Pleasure, tells Yahoo that celebrity plastic surgery reveals act as a powerful endorsement.

"Celebrity disclosure endorses plastic surgery, especially when celebrities go so far as to name the clinic and the surgeon to boot," Lee says. "Like other luxury goods and services, however, most people cannot afford what the Kardashians can afford, so the real danger could be in the quality of care everyday people have access to comparatively as they go in search of 'knock offs.'"

It’s far less clear whether the procedures deliver the intended emotional effects. A 2024 study found that 77.8% of people said they believed that a cosmetic procedure would help their self-esteem, compared to 47.9% pre-COVID. An earlier 2012 study shows that optimism might be misplaced: "A series of mental health symptoms predict cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery does not in turn seem to alleviate such mental health problems," the authors write.

Celebrities are like the rest of us: Changing their appearance to be closer to the beauty standard is a way to fit in with their peers, advance their careers, and avoid criticism.

Even some of the celebrities who have shared their cosmetic surgery details might offer a more tempered view than one would think. "I think there should be no shame in people wanting to change the way they look, but I also see that the standard of beauty has become more and more artificial for women," Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay told Bustle in 2025. "Being on TV, it’s really, really hard to see yourself constantly and to be amongst women who are physically flawless in every way. Everyone has perfect teeth, lashes, and hair. It’s what I call the required uniform of a Housewife — and as you become more of a Housewife, it becomes more entrenched. The pursuit of perfection is never fully possible, just like it’s not possible to be fully hair-free."

In this way, celebrities are like the rest of us: Changing their appearance to be closer to the beauty standard is a way to fit in with their peers, advance their careers and avoid criticism. "People have been talking about my looks since I was 13. It just gets exhausting," Kylie Jenner said through tears in a memorable 2024 episode of The Kardashians.

Plastic surgeons often sell the idea that going under the knife can benefit a woman’s overall quality of life. But these studies don't go into why cosmetic surgery has this effect: Because it can help women get closer to society's narrow beauty standards. Every time you get surgery, whether it's a nose job or an appendectomy, there is a risk of complications. And sometimes, whether it's a nose job or an appendectomy, the benefits outweigh the risks.

Studies show that women who are perceived as more attractive make more money, are more likely to be believed when they speak out against sexual harassment,are less likely to be arrested and are even perceived to be "more human" than their less attractive peers.

To put it another way, all this open talk about cosmetic upgrades is just another way to tackle a very old problem: the pervasive consequences women face for falling outside society’s narrow standards of beauty. It’s an ancient dilemma: Do you try to make the system work for you? Or do you try to live outside of it as much as possible? Do you lean in or lean out or try to find some kind of middle ground?

Like everything else that has to do with women's appearance, from what we do with our body hair to the clothes we wear, these choices are both highly personal and highly scrutinized. In the words of Kylie Jenner, responding to the fan who asked for her breast augmentation details, "Hope this helps lol."

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”