‘Big’ news broke this week that the lip queen herself, Kylie Jenner, has dissolved her famous lip fillers. After years of attention and obsession around plump lips, is the beauty industry about to go into retrograde?
You’d have to live under a rock to not be aware of Kylie Jenner and her enormous influence on beauty and aesthetic trends. Her over lined lips sparked a worldwide obsession with plump lips (before she admitted they were surgically enhanced) and the ‘Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge’ (where teens would squeeze their lips into bottles to give themselves a Jenner pout) is now infamous. However once she actually admitted that makeup wasn’t entirely responsible for her famous pout, that’s when things really got out of control.
You can’t go anywhere or watch any reality programme now without seeing a girl with massive, surgically enhanced lips. Often these fillers are not subtle and natural looking, but rather are characterised by a swollen upper lip and a duck pout. It’s interesting that the pressure Kylie felt to have larger lips has now infected millions of millenials who have seen small lips as a negative attribute because of Kylie.
But now… is everything about to change? In a previous blog post I wrote about Meghan Markle’s wedding makeup, I predicted that the glam beauty trend would soon come to an end, with society finally embracing a more natural look. Is this the next step in the prophecy coming true? Cosmetic surgery – and particularly dermal fillers – have become the norm in society, with people of all ages searching for a plumper pout. However, given how much influence Kylie has, I think a giant shift is about to occur.
Kylie’s insecurity about her lips is well-known – she’s talked about it on Keeping Up With the Kardashians and in subsequent interviews. However, to address and accept her biggest insecurity now and demonstrate that she is now comfortable in her own skin sets an example to impressionable young men and women that they are perfect as they are (and maybe that you still won’t find body confidence at the end of a needle). By dissolving her lips, my hope is that it will stop holding women to such high and somewhat unattainable beauty standards. For the last 3 years women have looked to Kylie and the Kardashian family to tell them what is beautiful (whether it’s big lips or being thin with larger assets). While all eyes will still be on Kylie, hopefully young men and women will not feel such pressure to follow the trend and surgically enhance their lips, but instead it will encourage self acceptance. This has the potential to make something that was once considered an unattractive trait to be seen as perfectly beautiful (as it always should have been).
So what’s brought around this change for the lip legend? Her daughter. Apparently, becoming a mother has reorientated Kylie’s priorities and has made her more body confident – and good for her! Supposedly during her pregnancy when she was unable to have her fillers topped up, she started to really like the more natural look. After seeing her lips ‘dissolved’ I still think she looks great. Her filler aged her quite considerably and it will be lovely for her to actually look 20, rather than 10 years older.
And it. is. starting. Just three days after Kylie announced she had had her lip fillers dissolved, Teen Mom ‘star’ Farrah Abraham has also had her lips dissolved. This indicates to me that the pressure to appear a certain way is finally starting to diminish and women will more freedom over their own appearance.
Hopefully what this change will do is usher in an era of greater self acceptance and expel the need to alter your appearance into the image of a celebrity. It does also demonstrate that these aesthetic trends do come and go so quickly that it should make anyone think twice before making any edits to your appearance. Kylie is doing it again – another beauty revolution. But this time, I think it’s going to be a positive one.
Xo
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