For decades, if not centuries, there are certain questions to which we have returned again and again—questions which illuminate the mysteries of human existence and threaten to drive us mad. We ask: Will we ever have peace in the Middle East? Are we alone in the universe?
Are Kylie Jenner's breasts real?
This last question, trivial though it may be, is a longtime topic of national interest. In 2016, a minor controversy erupted after internet commenters noticed that Jenner’s breasts looked, well, breastier than usual. Jenner, whose maintenance of her brand apparently included keeping tabs on the online discourse about her body, piped up to blame the change on hormones: She hadn’t had surgery, she said. She was just having her period.
“TMI but it’s that time of the month,” she told the fans quizzing her on Twitter.
Such deflections were typical, not just for Jenner but for the moment, which had not yet moved on from the decades-old consensus that when it came to boob jobs and the like, the public might wonder, and the tabloids might speculate, but a lady never tells. As a plastic-surgery-denying Cher told ABC in 2002: “If I want to put my tits on my back, it’s nobody’s business but my own.” It was also the era of access journalism, which meant that even the most absurd denials of surgical enhancement would be inevitably amplified by a credulous media apparatus; at the time, Jenner’s claim of menstruation-induced mammary swelling even prompted a sort of public group therapy session among the editorial staff at Glamour, who praised the reality TV star for bravely bringing attention to “the little-discussed reality of period boobs.”
But cut to the current year, and the contours of this issue, so to speak, have been dramatically altered. Last week, inquiries were made once again as to the provenance of Jenner’s rack, this time by a TikTok poster, YouTuber Rach Leary, who wanted the same breasts for herself: “Girl, can you just tell me-slash-us what is it that you asked for when you had your boobs done?” Leary asked, going on to describe Jenner’s breasts as “the most perfect, natural-looking boob job ever.” And this time, Jenner replied not with a denial, but with the precise make, model, and positioning of the breast implants she does, of course, have—along with the name of the surgeon who’d put them in.
