“Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back.”
Kylie Jenner has publicly joined a long list of celebrities who have come to regret the cosmetic work they’ve had done.
The 25-year-old, who had long denied ever going under the knife, recently opened up about her relationship with plastic surgery. In an episode from the most recent season of The Kardashians, Jenner revealed that she had a breast augmentation when she was 19 years old, before having her first child, Stormi.
“I had beautiful breasts,” she said. “I just wish, obviously, I never got them done to begin with.”
The beauty mogul also said that she’d be “heartbroken” if her daughter ever had work done when she was as young as Jenner was. “I wish I could be her and do it all differently, ’cause I wouldn’t touch anything,” Jenner said on the show.
Whether it’s going under the knife or engaging in cosmetic trends like buccal fat removal and the Ozempic craze, it’s clear that taking control of one’s appearance is an increasingly popular choice in American culture. That’s especially prevalent among celebrities who have the resources to really alter the way they look — and Jenner isn’t the only high-profile person to wish they never got that nose job or face lift.
Here’s a look at some of the other stars who have spoken publicly about wishing they’d made a different choice.
Kristin Davis
The star of And Just Like That and Sex and the City recently spoke to The Telegraph about her experience with Botox and fillers. Davis, 58, said that she was “ridiculed relentlessly” for getting the procedures, which ultimately led her to “get them dissolved.
“I have shed tears about it,” she said. “It’s very stressful.”
Davis also said that it was hard to embrace how her body naturally changed as she aged, especially when her younger years are forever captured on a classic TV series: “It’s a challenge to remember that you don’t have to look like that.”
Courteney Cox
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Courteney Cox said that she also struggled with growing older and ended up using fillers, which ultimately left her “looking really strange.”
“There was a time when you go, ‘Oh, I’m changing. I’m looking older,’” she said. “And I didn’t realize that, oh shit, I’m actually looking really strange with injections and doing stuff to my face that I would never do now.”
Cox said she eventually got her fillers removed, but she described using them initially as a “domino effect” that turns one dose into more and more.
“You don’t realize that you look a little off, so then you keep doing more because you look normal to yourself,” she said. “And you look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, that looks good.’ You don’t realize what it looks like to the outside person.”
Jamie Lee Curtis
As someone who grew up with a famous mother (actress Janet Leigh) and kicked off her own Hollywood career back in 1978 with the horror classic Halloween, it may not be all that surprising that Jamie Lee Curtis eventually succumbed to the kind of criticism that’s all too common for famous women after overhearing a hurtful comment from a crew member.
“I naturally had puffy eyes,” she said in 2019. “If you see photographs of me as a child, I look like I haven’t slept. I’ve just always been that person, and we were shooting a scene in a courtroom with that kind of high, nasty fluorescent light, and it came around to my coverage in the scene, and [the cameraman] said, ‘I’m not shooting her today. Her eyes are too puffy.’”
As a result, she got “routine plastic surgery to remove the puffiness,” which ultimately led her to develop an opiate addiction that lasted for a decade until she got sober in 1999.
Curtis has also said that she thinks the rise of plastic surgery is “wiping out generations of beauty.” “Once you mess with your face, you can’t get it back,” she said.
Melanie Griffith
In 2017, Working Girl star Melanie Griffith said she’d finally come to understand how drastically her face had been altered by operations she’d had about two decades earlier.
“I didn’t [realize] until people started saying, ‘Oh my god, what has she done?’ I was so hurt,” she recalled. “I went to a different doctor, and he started dissolving all of the shit that this other woman doctor put in. Hopefully, I look more normal now.”
Gisele Bündchen
She’s highly regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world, but even Gisele Bündchen isn’t immune to the criticism that sends so many stars to their surgeon’s office — which intensified after she became a mom.
“I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver,” the supermodel told People in 2018. “I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it.”
That self-doubt let to her getting a breast augmentation, but she immediately regretted it.
“When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognize,” she said. “For the first year I wore [baggy] clothes because I felt uncomfortable.”
Heidi Montag
At 23, reality star Heidi Montag once had 10 procedures done in one day, including a brow lift and chin reduction. At the time, she told People that she thought she looked “way better” and that she planned to continue having work done as she got older.
But by 32, she felt differently. The Hills star told Cosmopolitan in 2019 that she was “way too young to make such a life-changing decision,” but she did so because of the “negativity and hate on the internet.”
“I was also on TV, where every perceived flaw is amplified,” she said. “I think I looked in the mirror a little too much. I wish I had waited and not made a decision so young, because I have long-term health complications.”
