You might be surprised hearing that Katie Price has said there’s “nothing worse” than young women getting cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is, after all, part of Price’s identity – a significant factor in her becoming, and remaining, so famous.
At 45, she has had 16 boob jobs – last year, the “biggest yet” – and countless other procedures, including a Brazilian butt lift and liposuction, and facial treatments such as filler, Botox, a nose job and substantial dental work. You might well argue that it’s hypocritical for a woman in the public eye to send such mixed messages.
But in my view, Price’s statements – that surgery is “damaging to your body” and that “everyone looks like aliens these days”, made in an interview with Elizabeth Day on the podcast How to Fail – are refreshing. Not because these ideas are revolutionary, but precisely because of the contradictions that Price embodies (in the same interview, she said “I still choose to do it”, and admitted that choosing her next procedure was “like going shopping”).
Her apparent inconsistency is a rare acknowledgement of the fact that this is a complex issue – and to admit that, for many people, it’s not as straightforward as a simple “good or bad”, “yes or no”, is the first step in tackling it.
There has been a huge rise in the number of people undergoing non-invasive cosmetic procedures, such as Botox and injectable filler, in the past 10 years. In the UK, demand has been up 50 per cent since the end of lockdown – an increase that reflects the steady growth of the industry since the 2010s, when “Instagram face” (a look commonly associated with the Kardashians consisting of big lips, a small nose, feline eyes and chiselled cheeks) became the new aesthetic ideal for young women.
Software such as FaceTune and filters on Snapchat and Instagram can make it very difficult to tell what someone really looks like from an online profile, whether they’re famous or not – a fact that puts enormous pressure on young people to look a certain way.
Where surgery was once taboo, now having “work” done to meet such a standard is as normal as plucking your eyebrows. In fact, tracking public perception of Price herself goes a long way in showing just how much things have changed in 20 years.
When Price began her career in Page Three modelling in the late 90s, she was known as “Jordan”, an alias that, over the next few years, became associated with her multiple boob jobs, her deliberately “trashy” look and outspoken personality. The widely held view of her was that she was fake – and, more importantly, that that made her an outlier, or even an object of derision.
Now, the scales have tipped. Since the peak-tabloid 2000s, Price has been accepted as a legitimate cultural figure for several reasons – not least her openness about her severely disabled son, Harvey – but among them the fact that looking as fake as she does is now very normal.
Consider reality TV stars like Charlotte Crosby, Vicky Pattinson, Gemma Collins: you’re more surprised when you see a woman in that world who hasn’t had their lips filled, teeth remodelled and jawline sculpted. Over the past few years, Price has still been subjected to multiple tabloid stories with grossly blown-up photographs of her face next to speculations that she’s “gone too far”. It’s just that now, she’s far from alone, because so many others have “gone too far”, too.
The problem is that aside from sensationalised media stories, conversations about surgery are too often removed from the substantive reality of altering your body. Rather, they are about the much murkier topics of individual choice, honesty and authenticity – all of which can feel fragile for women, loaded as they are with the weight of patriarchy.
In 2015, in the event that precipitated the filler boom, the youngest Kardashian sister, Kylie Jenner, had lip filler injected and lied about it, using her transformation instead to market an own-brand make-up “lip kit” that she had supposedly used to make her lips look fuller. After months of flogging the products, she eventually admitted she had had filler – and that itself became a badge of honour, so brave was she, the narrative went, to admit that she had been insecure about her lips in the first place.
These kinds of circular arguments are exactly what fuels the problem, which is a complete lack of clear thinking and critical engagement with the issue of thousands of young women (and it’s an issue that does disproportionately affect women) changing their faces at great personal expense, both financial and emotional.
With the stakes dramatically lowered when “procedures” are marketed as “non-surgical”, connotations of “living one’s truth” can just as easily fuel the decision to change yourself as they can the choice not to. Price, meanwhile, has brought the conversation back to cold, hard, reality: it’s painful, it’s expensive, it can make you look like an alien, and she wouldn’t recommend it.
All that, and she would still do it herself – the kind of ambivalence that rarely gets airtime. We have frequently heard about celebrities regretting their surgical interventions (Bella Hadid had a nose job at age 14 and now regrets it, saying she would have “grown into” her nose; the Love Island contestant and influencer Molly Mae caused a storm when she posted a YouTube vlog about having her facial filler dissolved), and if you go to the right corners of YouTube – which I frequently do – you’ll find plenty of videos in which plastic surgeons analyse well-known celebrities’ faces to cast light on the surgeries they have possibly, privately had (and let me tell you: those “natural” beauties aren’t nearly as natural as you think).
The clash of these two polarised attitudes – performative honesty and total secrecy – is unimaginably harmful for young women. It doesn’t help to hear about reversals and regret when we are still bombarded constantly with images of “perfect”-looking faces and bodies, and when half our lives are lived online, where it’s difficult to know what’s real.
Instead, what we need is Price’s uncomfortable frankness: this is far from ideal, but it’s difficult not to be drawn to it. Price is right that women in their early twenties getting filler have no idea how they’re going to look in 20 years.
She has enough experience to say it’s “damaging to your body”. But unlike so many others, who use the thin guise of “authenticity” to hide what they’re actually doing, she also has the guts to say she’ll do it again. Reading between the lines, that’s a very Katie Price way to say that she, like us, doesn’t have all the answers.