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 to not 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 this 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 late father.