Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching: Kylie Jenner opened up about getting a breast augmentation at 19 years old. Now, at 25, the reality TV star and mogul said, “I wish I never got them done to begin with.”
It was a confession she made during Thursday’s season finale of The Kardashians on Hulu. Jenner said she had “beautiful breasts” that were the “perfect size” and would “recommend anyone thinking about it to wait after children.” She added that she’d be “heartbroken” if her daughter Stormi wanted to get cosmetic surgery at the same age she did. Although her statements shocked fans and made headlines, many women also feel similarly about their own plastic surgery choices.
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Ashley Farmer, a 36-year-old mother of three living in Dallas, knows the feeling well, telling that she had an experience similar to Jenner’s regarding breast implant regret.
“I got implants also when I was 19, which was in 2007,” Farmer says, noting that she had saline implants that were 325 cubic centimeters. “I really enjoyed having them for a long time. Aesthetically, I thought they were very pretty in comparison to what they previously looked like. But I never thought about the consequences.”
Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching, Farmer says she “made zero considerations” before going under the knife, neglected to do proper research and hadn’t known anybody who had breast implants when she got them herself. It was a lack of forethought that she didn’t think mattered at the time. “When I got pregnant with my daughter in 2014 is when I starting thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, can I even breastfeed?'”
Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching, Alana, a 29-year-old New York City resident who was only comfortable sharing her first name for this story, also faced a sudden realization that her breast augmentation came with greater responsibility than she had initially considered.
“When I was 21 and I got implants, I wasn’t really thinking about the future. I was just thinking I want this, and that’s all I cared about,” she tells Yahoo Life. “But I’ve gotten [my breast implants redone] twice in the last seven years because they ruptured.”
Her first implants were silicone and part of a 2019 recall after being linked to a rare type of lymphoma.
“When you’re 21, 22, 23, you’re in a different mindset, so I kind of ignored it,” she says. It wasn’t until she felt the shape of her breasts changing that she went to get an MRI, which showed that both implants had ruptured. Alana underwent a five-hour surgery in December 2022 to have the silicone implants removed and replaced with saline. “It was when I was preparing for that second surgery and I was reading through all the warnings about breastfeeding and the potential health risks that I was just like, ‘Why the f*** did I do this in the first place?'”
Experts say these women were too young
“Plastic surgery has a lot more complications than any plastic surgeons will admit to,” Dr. Terry Dubrow, the plastic surgeon behind E!’s hit show Botched, tells Yahoo Life. “Particularly when you do procedures that contain foreign bodies like breast augmentation, the complication rate is so high that the ultimate regret rate is so high — that a lot of people as they get older and they start suffering those complications say, you know, I wish I never did this.”
Dubrow says that a lot of it has to do with age, as 19, 20, 21 “is far too young to consider a procedure of this magnitude and with this many potential complications down the road.”
Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching, Of course, “there’s this huge spectrum of women and the reasons why they get breast implants,” including asymmetric breasts, according to Utah-based plastic surgeon, Dr. Jerry Chidester. “I would say majority of the time what I see is really women just want to feel comfortable in their own body. And they have a body that they don’t feel that [in],” he tells Yahoo Life.
This can contribute to people overlooking more serious implications or making impulsive decisions when it comes to breast enhancement, especially at a young age. Dr. Thomas P. Sterry, who practices in New York City, says that “sometimes the breasts aren’t finished growing yet.”
Pregnancy can play a role in breast implant regret
“If someone tells me that pregnancy is imminent, I do point out that your breast’s morphology, meaning the shape of your breasts, might change significantly,” Sterry says. “When I’m in that situation, I feel obliged to say to them, ‘Listen, you might want to wait.'”
Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching, While Farmer was relieved to be able to breastfeed her children with her implants, they contributed to other struggles she had postpartum.
“I woke up basically in a stranger’s body because my chest got so large overnight, just because, you know, water weight, and everything that happens, your breast tissu e expands when you’re pregnant,” she says. “It was alarming.”
Dubrow says that having kids and breastfeeding with implants causes “so much more stretching and changing of the breast tissue” than would happen to a natural breast without augmentation.
Ultimately, the changes that happened to her breasts with each of Farmer’s three children led her to get an explant in November 2022.
“My chest would literally be sore from being so heavy with the implants. Working out was so difficult, normal activities were so difficult, lying on my side or lying on my back was difficult,” she says. “Had I never gotten implants, I wouldn’t have had to go through, you know, the last 10 years of stress that I’ve had.”
And like Jenner, Farmer hopes that her children never do.
Hindsight is 20/20
Must Read Kylie Jenner Launching, While children aren’t in Alana’s near future, she realizes that her breast implants and the upkeep required will be made more difficult when starting a family — not only when considering the ability to breastfeed but also any future related expenses.
“If I have to pay $20,000 again in five years, I can’t. And at that point, I’m going to have things that are even more important, like hopefully a baby,” she says. “It’s just such a financial commitment that you don’t think about when you’re young, and you just want what you want.”
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