Kim Kardashian’s Biography Leaves Beauty’s Role in Her Fame Unexamined
Citizen Kim explores Kardashian’s life but skips her influence on beauty ideals and the long-running speculation around cosmetic procedures.
Citizen Kim: The Woman Who Created the Future gathers stories from Kim Kardashian, her friends, relatives, business associates and former partners. Journalist Jonathan Van Meter spent five years reporting the biography, which covers her early relationships, three marriages, the Paris robbery, her mother’s affair, the O.J. Simpson trial and the so-called “Kardashian Curse.” Yet the book largely sidesteps a subject woven through Kardashian’s public image and business: beauty.
That omission stands out because Kardashian’s appearance has been part of her fame since the beginning of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Beauty gets a brief nod in the book’s anecdotes. A family nanny described Kardashian as stunning when she was 10, and her father, Robert Kardashian, once cautioned her that her curves might lead people to assume she was older. But across 340 pages, Van Meter doesn’t meaningfully examine the family’s influence on beauty ideals or the persistent speculation about cosmetic procedures that has followed them for years. Beauty standards are part of the story readers already associate with Kardashian; their near absence leaves a conspicuous gap.
A conspicuous silence
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Van Meter was asked how Kardashian reconciles her family’s role in expanding beauty ideals with the pressure to meet them. His answer was that he wasn’t sure she does: she “doesn’t dwell on it.” He also said he left discussion of procedures out because the subject became “weird and complicated,” and stated that Kardashian had never had invasive plastic surgery, adding that her butt, breasts and nose were her own. In a 2022 Allure cover interview, Kardashian said she had received Botox injections and nothing else.
Those statements don’t resolve the wider question the book avoids. Kardashian’s body was a talking point from the first episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians in 2007, when Kris Jenner remarked on her daughter’s butt. Four years later, an episode followed Kardashian as she got an X-ray to address tabloid claims about implants. That scene became part of the family’s public record, but an X-ray can’t easily identify fat transfers or fat grafting, techniques used in Brazilian Butt Lifts. The book mentions Kardashian’s mother’s breast augmentation in connection with a chapter about her parents’ divorce, while leaving the speculation surrounding Kardashian herself untouched.
The family’s screen presence has stretched across 28 seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians and The Kardashians. Throughout that time, Kardashian and her sisters have promoted products including waist trainers, detox teas, supplements and shapewear. The image being sold has shifted, while the sisters’ changing appearances have remained a source of public discussion. They’ve been criticized for promoting body ideals that many people can’t attain, even as the family has rarely discussed its part in shaping those ideals. The gap could reflect personal privacy, business interests, or both; the biography doesn’t investigate it.
Who gets to define the ideal?
The closest the sisters came to directly weighing their influence was a season three conversation on The Kardashians. Kylie Jenner asked Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian, “I just think we have huge influence. And what are we doing with our power?” The discussion turned toward the pressure the women themselves experience, rather than the role they may play in setting expectations for others. A 2022 study from Toronto’s York University adds context: women shown images of “slim-thick” bodies, with Kim and Kylie named as examples, reported more body dissatisfaction than women shown other body types.
The family didn’t invent cosmetic procedures or the narrow ideals attached to them. Kris Jenner wrote in her 2011 memoir, Kris Jenner… and All Things Kardashian, about her first breast augmentation in 1988, when Kim was eight. Jenner recalled wanting to leave with “those high, perky, fabulous boobs that you see on Playboy bunnies.” That history complicates any simple account of the family as either authors or targets of appearance pressures. It also makes Van Meter’s decision to leave beauty largely outside the biography feel more consequential.
There’s a business question in the silence, too. Kardashian sells shapewear and a nine-step SKKN by Kim routine. Would frank discussion of procedures change how customers understand products associated with achieving a Kardashian-inspired look? The source raises the question without settling it. Kylie Jenner’s experience offers a counterpoint: she disclosed lip filler in 2015, then discussed dissolving much of it on The Kardashians in 2024. Her openness didn’t prevent her from selling 51% of Kylie Cosmetics to Coty in 2019 for a reported $600 million; the company is said to remain active. In other words, disclosure and commercial success can coexist.
Other sisters have become more forthcoming, too. Kylie said in 2023 that she had breast augmentation at 19, then shared specific details of the procedure and her surgeon’s name in a TikTok comment in 2025. Khloé confirmed she’d had one nose job in 2021 and reiterated the rhinoplasty in a more recent Instagram comment. Kris Jenner’s facelift also drew widespread attention. These disclosures make the biography’s silence more noticeable: the family’s relationship with the subject is changing, but Citizen Kim doesn’t trace that shift.
On page 123, Van Meter compares Kardashian to Andy Warhol, another figure who documented his life while resisting discussion of what it meant. It’s an evocative comparison, but the book doesn’t resolve the tension between Kardashian’s constant visibility and her reluctance to interpret her influence. For readers, beauty isn’t a side note to that public life; it’s part of how the Kardashian image travels and sells. Whether or not Kardashian has had procedures, the questions around her appearance continue to hold attention—and the biography leaves their place in her story open.
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