‘Heidi Montag before and after surgery’ has been a Google search for the ages, after the reality star famously had ten cosmetic procedures in one day while starring on the original series’ of The Hills.
Now it’s a breakout search once again as many of us relieve the heady early days of Speidi, LC and co, with the first two series recently becoming available to watch on Netflix (you can find the other four series and the 2019 reboot, The Hills: New Beginnings, on Amazon Prime).
But knowing what we know now about Heidi’s ‘regrets’, isn’t it time we stopped gawking?
Watching the heart-breaking scenes where Heidi unveils her new face to her mum as a teenager, I don’t remember being particularly phased. There’s a sanctimonious judgement of women who choose to undergodramatic cosmetic procedures which is easy to internalise when we’re young.
Now, though, the scene hits differently. I’m not a mother, but Heidi’s mum Darlene’s evident sorrow at how her baby had not only irreversibly changed her own face, but also that she would be led to that decision at all, still holds an emotional punch a decade-plus since it originally aired.
What’s even clearer to see is how much pain a then-23-year-old Heidi is in – not physically, although she has spoken before about the traumatic recovery process and how she nearly died taking the strong pain medication she was prescribed. Her face, still slightly swollen from the procedures, crumples as Darlene expresses that she thinks Heidi looked better before.
For a woman so desperate for validation and reassurance that she would risk her life for it, hearing from your own mother it’s all been for nothing would be about as hurtful as it gets, and the conversation led to two years of estrangement between the two.
In 2019, Heidi and her husband spoke candidly about what lead her to undergo such a drastic and potentially dangerous transformation, and her regrets. Spencer explained that she’d even brought along print-outs to the surgeons office of the abuse she was receiving online, to act as a kind of guide.
‘Everyone’s insecure but it’s different when you’re young and on TV and everyone’s talking about you,’ he told Cosmopolitan. ‘And it’s upsetting that you can go to a doctor and say “Here’s what I hate about myself,” and he’ll say “I can fix that. For free.”’
And while Heidi, still married to Spencer with whom she now has two children, said she’s ‘not against plastic surgery’, she did say she wishes she’d waited until she was older to go under the knife.
‘Everyone always shows you the before and after pics,’ she said in the same interview. ‘They don’t show you how devastating the recovery is. I don’t regret a lot of my enhancement, but plastic surgery isn’t something that should be glorified. Take it seriously.’
Perhaps it's time to rethink that reaction to Heidi's 'new face', and the narrative around it. How many of us wouldn’t, in our early twenties and with access to big money or, in Heidi’s case, free surgery, make the same decision to alleviate our crippling insecurities by ‘fixing’ the part of ourselves we were unhappy with? There’s a reason ‘tweak-ments’ are increasingly being targeted at teenagers and young women, and it’s because it’s when we’re most susceptible to the idea that being beautiful is the most important thing in the world.
By today’s standards and with the prevalence of filler, Botox and other ‘non-invasive’ procedures, Heidi’s makeover isn’t unusual or even that dramatic – there’s loads of reality stars around who are completely unrecognisable from their early days on TV. But at the time, set against the misogyny and media sexism of the '00s and early '10s, her changing face was the tabloid fodder of dreams. There’s an enduring fascination, as the breakout search term ‘Heidi Montag before and after surgery’ proves, but these days there’s also - thankfully - more sensitivity to the vulnerabilities of a young girl torn apart by the early days of a toxic online shaming culture.
Heidi has not commented on whether she’s had any of those ten fateful procedures reversed, but recently she’s been looking more like herself again, and happier than ever. Has Heidi come full circle with her surgery journey? Only she knows. But by her own, and her mum’s, admission, she was a confident young woman growing up, and it seems like she’s finally regained some of that confidence after nearly two decades under the glare of celebrity.
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