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Apparently, 28 seasons of a reality show hasn’t shown us enough of Kim Kardashian’s backstory. The celebrity mogul is the subject of a new biography, Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future, penned by journalist-cum-confidant Jonathan Van Meter, who interviewed Kardashian as well as friends, family, business partners, and ex-boyfriends over the course of five years. The book contains never-before-heard stories of Kardashian’s short-lived ecstasy phase, the Paris robbery, and the ins and outs of her first relationship with TJ Jackson, Michael Jackson’s nephew. It also touches on the dissolution of her three marriages, her mother’s affair, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the so-called “Kardashian Curse.” But it leaves out a significant part of what keeps the Kardashian machine running: beauty.
Of course, Kardashian’s natural beauty is often referenced—early on it's mentioned how, in 1991, the family’s nanny wrote in her journal that Kardashian was gorgeous: “Even as a ten-year-old child, she is stunning.” Her late father, Robert Kardashian, warned her in a letter not to let men take advantage of her because she’s “got a curvy body and people are going to think you’re older than you are.” But not once in the 340-page book is there a mention or analysis of Kardashian’s impact on societal beauty standards, a clearly influential part of her life that seems strange to ignore, let alone the did-she-or-didn’t-she speculation on cosmetic procedures and plastic surgeries that has surrounded the family for years.
Is this on purpose? Or is it because Kardashian isn’t all that interested in exploring her impact on the system at large? In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Van Meter is asked by the interviewer—who happens to be a friend of his—how Kardashian deals with the contradiction that her family helped expand beauty standards but also makes them continuously unattainable. “I’m not sure she does. She doesn’t dwell on it,” he told the outlet. As for the procedures, “I didn’t write about this because it became so weird and complicated, but Kim has never had invasive plastic surgery. Her butt and boobs and nose—those are all her own.” (During her 2022 Allure cover interview, Kardashian admitted to getting Botox injections but nothing else.)
Part of Kardashian’s notoriety in the early days of her fame was in part due to her exaggerated curves. The very first episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2007 opens up with the size of her ass being pointed out by her mother, Kris Jenner. Its volume became such a point of contention in the tabloids that in 2011 there was an episode devoted to Kardashian attempting to prove that the junk in her trunk was, indeed, real. The show documented her getting an X-ray of her butt to once and for all declare that there were not any silicone implants lodged inside. (For what it’s worth, an X-ray cannot easily detect fat transfers or fat grafting, the techniques used in Brazilian Butt Lifts.) The book declines to mention plastic surgery speculation around its subject entirely—the only augmentation mentioned is her mother’s boob job, referenced at the beginning of a chapter that dives into the matriarch’s divorce from Kardashian’s father.
Kardashian’s consistent denial of being surgically enhanced continued over the next 28 seasons of E!’s Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Hulu’s The Kardashians, all the while she and her sisters hawked waist trainers, detox teas, supplements, and shapewear, tools to achieve whatever fantasy body they were selling at the time. And still, for the past 20 years, we’ve witnessed Kardashian, along with the rest of her family, transform while seldom acknowledging it. Each sister has magically been bestowed tighter skin, smaller waists, bigger boobs, plumper lips, and longer extensions, among other things. They’ve long been accused of promoting unrealistic body standards for women around the world, and yet can’t seem to intellectualize it themselves, whether it’s because of privacy concerns or what it means for their commercial interests.
The closest the Kardashian sisters have come to grasping the point is a discussion about society’s beauty standards in season three of The Kardashians, when Kylie Jenner brought the topic up to Khloé Kardashian and Kourtney Kardashian. “I just think we have huge influence. And what are we doing with our power?” she asks. It’s the only introspective question posed in the scene. The three women continued to discuss how societal pressure has impacted them—not how they’ve had a heavy hand in shaping it. (A 2022 study conducted by Toronto’s York University found that women who were inundated with images of “slim-thick” bodies—Kim and Kylie are both used as examples—experience more body dissatisfaction than seeing images of other body types.)
It’s not like the Kardashians invented plastic surgery culture or unattainable body image. In Kris Jenner’s memoir, Kris Jenner… and All Things Kardashian, published in 2011, she writes about her first breast augmentation in 1988, the year Kim turned eight, and her hopes of leaving the operating table with “those high, perky, fabulous boobs that you see on Playboy bunnies.” In many ways, the Kar-Jenners have been victims of it, too—which just makes Van Meter’s account feel even more incomplete.
It’s hard to say whether or not that strategy is to protect their financial interests in selling products that ultimately make us all look more Kardashian. Who could be swayed to buy shapewear to look like Kim if we knew she had a BBL, or would buy a $630, nine-step SKKN by Kim routine if she, say, got a facelift? Isn’t the point to try to look more Kardashian-esque? To Kylie Jenner’s credit, she was the first one to say she had gotten lip filler in 2015, and was also quick to say when she dissolved much of it on an episode of The Kardashians in 2024. Interestingly, that didn’t seem to impact her business negatively. In 2019, she sold 51% of Kylie Cosmetics (the range born out of her lip-lining techniques) to Coty for a reported $600 million. And the company is said to still be going strong. Transparency isn’t necessarily bad for business.
Historically, each of the Kardashian women has outright denied or refused to discuss cosmetic surgery; they seem to have recently softened on the subject. In the same episode of The Kardashians in 2023, Kylie Jenner revealed that she had her first breast augmentation at 19. Two years later, she shared the exact details of her surgery (445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle) and the surgeon’s name in a TikTok comment section. Khloé Kardashian revealed she “had one nose job” in 2021 and again confirmed the rhinoplasty in a recent Instagram comment, and Kris Jenner’s recent facelift led to a tsunami of photos and hot takes.
So, yes, what stood out about Citizen Kim isn’t a denial of plastic surgery or a more positive stance—it’s the choice to ignore it altogether. We do get, at best, a flattering acknowledgment of what Kardashian chooses to share and why. On page 123, Van Meter seemingly tries to understand why Kardashian refuses to be introspective by comparing her to Andy Warhol, “another enigmatic figure who obsessively documented his life but was not comfortable discussing its meaning.” It’s a paradox we never see reconciled in the book. But if we had to infer, chatter is also a key sales driver of the Kardashian empire. And here we are, asking the same questions of Kardashian that we have for nearly two decades. Regardless of what she has or hasn’t done to her body, we’re all still talking about it.
