When Keeping Up With the Kardashians first aired on E! in 2007, Kylie Jenner was a young, normal girl, albeit with lots of money and an impossibly famous family. These days, the makeup mogul has grown up a lot and looks pretty different from her former self. A recent Instagram photo has many fans thinking the star has plastic surgery to thank for her transformation, NewBeauty reports.
The photo, part of a Barbie-themed photo shoot the star recently did with Flaunt magazine, features Jenner in a platinum blonde waist-length wig, tiny crop top, and pink Juicy Couture track pants. She’s wearing hot pink eyeliner and is posing against an intentionally fake-looking, beach-scene backdrop (complete, of course, with a hot pink Barbie surfboard). It looks, in other words, exactly how you’d expect a Barbie-themed shoot starring Kylie Jenner to look.
Once Jenner posted the photo to Instagram on Thursday, however, fans pointed out that there appears to be a vertical line running down the length of her breast. Many said it looked like a scar and cited it as proof that Jenner has undergone plastic surgery (specifically, breast augmentation). Others, however, wrote it off as just a shadow.
It seems pretty far-fetched that you can tell if someone had surgery based on a shadow, so we talked to RealSelf contributor and plastic surgeon David Shafer, and New York City plastic surgeon Norman Rowe. Both, who have never treated Jenner, observed that it appears Jenner could have gotten her breasts enhanced, but said that the “line” that fans are citing as evidence probably is just a shadow.
In an email to Allure, Shafer explained,
“In the hundreds of breast implants that I have put into patients, I have never seen a distinct line like indicated in [Jenner’s] picture….If you look at the full picture, you can see the line extending down her flank as well. It looks more to me like effects of lighting or Photoshop, because a distinct line like that is not anatomical.” Typically, he says, plastic surgeons try to hide the incisions “in the inframammary fold, around the areola, or even in the armpit,” so it’s unlikely that Jenner would have such an obvious scar from a cosmetic procedure.
Nonetheless, both Shafer and Rowe believe Jenner’s bust is artificially enhanced, either by a traditional breast augmentation or a non-surgical cosmetic procedure. As Rowe explains,
“When a person has a lot of medial pole as well as lateral pole fullness, that’s usually a telltale sign of having had a breast augmentation…Kylie has this type of fullness.” (For all of us non-surgeons, “medial pole” refers to the middle region of the breast and “lateral pole” refers to the sides.) Shafer, similarly, believes that “there does appear to be an extra enhancement in the upper pole, which is often due to implants.”
