Liam Payne has been subject to vile trolling this week after appearing on the red carpet for the premiere of former band-mate Louis Tomlinson's new documentary All Of Those Voices. Posing alongside girlfriend Kate Cassidy, pictures of the 29-year-old swept social media, with users proclaiming their shock and horror at his ‘new face’.
‘Wtf happened to Liam Payne,’ one user wrote on Twitter. ‘Rhinoplasty, lip filler, cheek implants, chin implant, jaw shave, brow bone reduction, buccal fat removal, Botox and eye lift,’ another replied. Thousands of tweets later, ‘Liam Payne filler’, ‘Liam Payne new look’ and ‘Liam Payne new jaw’ are all breakout searches on Google. In fact, of the top 25 searches for Liam Payne, 16 of them are variations of searches around alleged ‘face surgery’ and ‘buccal fat removal’ – a procedure that involves removing fat from the cheeks to give a more chiselled look.
Now, Liam has not spoken out about getting plastic surgery (that hasn’t stopped cosmetic surgeons ‘weighing in’ on the matter), nor has he responded to the wave of mockery he’s received online this week. But that’s the thing: he shouldn’t have to. In fact, he shouldn’t be subject to such intense trolling for any kind of appearance change at all.
There seems to be a willingness online to partake in herd-like bullying when it comes to certain celebrities, particularly around the decision to undergo plastic surgery. Naturally, female celebrities bear the brunt of it, people dissecting every little line change on women’s faces every hour. But if we won’t stand for people pulling apart women’s looks online, surgically altered or not, we shouldn’t allow people to do it to male celebrities either.
We saw the same public mockery when Zac Efron appeared in public with a markedly new look in 2021, later opening up that it was due to reconstructive surgery after an accident that shattered his jaw in 2013. It’s always the same discourse, people sharing before and after pictures of the celebrity, critiquing every little change, viewing them as fair game for public ridicule.
Frankly, we shouldn’t view anyone’s appearance as an object with which the public can scrutinize or mock – whether they’ve changed it on purpose or not.