(In 2019, she sold a majority stake of the company to makeup giant Coty for $600 million.) The implications of Blackfishing She then parlayed the controversy into selling her Kylie Lip Kits, a venture that turned into Kylie Cosmetics, a multimillion-dollar cosmetics business. At a cosmetic surgery clinic in the U.K., inquiries into lip augmentation jumped 70% in 24 hours after the episode aired, while the American Society for Plastic Surgeons reported a double-digit increase in lip procedures performed in 2016, the year after Jenner said she got filler. Her sisters have all followed suit, most notably her youngest sibling, Kylie Jenner, whose dramatic beauty and body evolution in recent seasons peaked with a year-long denial of having lip fillers before she copped to having them in a confessional on the show. A 2018 study by the American Society for Plastic Surgeons found that butt-enhancing procedures had increased by 256% since 2000. (Kim has staunchly denied doing Blackface-after she was accused of wearing Blackface for a 2017 KKW Beauty campaign, she told the New York Times that she “would obviously never want to offend anyone,” and later replaced the photos.) Despite a cultural appropriation scandal ahead of its launch, her shapewear line SKIMS has found a strong base of customers who put their trust in Kim and her hourglass shape to deliver a product that will support their own curves-or the curves that they get surgically to emulate her. From sporting Fulani braids, which have roots in West Africa, and attributing the style to Bo Derek, another white woman, to the multiple times she’s been called out for wearing Blackface by wearing skin-darkening makeup, Kim is no stranger to making deliberate beauty and style choices that rely on racial performance-then turning around and finding ways to capitalize on it. While the allure of the “exotic” white woman is as old as the longtime debates about Cleopatra’s racial background, Kim has pioneered the branding of it as an identity, leveraging it for the creation of a fashion and beauty empire, leaning into the allure of her fame and endless resources to form a brand. The ‘exotic’ white woman and cultural appropriation Even after Keeping Up with the Kardashians ends and the family moves on to their new deal to create content for Disney and Hulu, this legacy will remain. The Kardashian-Jenner look is ubiquitous: Heavily contoured makeup, dramatically curvy bodies and plumped lips have had cyclical moments of popularity, but they owe much of their mainstream favor in recent years to the wide influence of the sisters. And it’s in the Kardashian-Jenner sisters’ wholehearted embrace of this tension that their family has forever changed the ways society thinks about bodies and beauty, forging the standards that have defined the past decade.īetween their loyal viewership on television and massive social media presences (Kim was the most followed person on Instagram in 2015 and currently has the 6th biggest account with 227 million followers), the family blazed a trail for a new model of celebrity: the influencer. It’s a vicious culture that valorizes curves on wealthy, racially ambiguous white women, but stigmatizes these traits on Black women one that plays into a longtime fascination with the aesthetics of Blackness and an unwillingness to engage with the ugliness of anti-Black racism at the same time. Read More: Kim Kardashian’s Nude Photos and Saartjie’s Choice: History’s Problem with Fascinating Bodies
![secret keepins pup white secret keepins pup white](https://i.etsystatic.com/iap/1c59e6/2024090570/iap_300x300.2024090570_36u0qhib.jpg)
By contrast, Kim has explicitly benefitted from her much-talked-about figure, tapping into an audience that sees her as no ordinary white woman, but instead as an exotic and interesting one. Baartman was paraded semi-nude, her posterior exhibited as a curio of sorts for European audiences that could, for a price, touch her body-a sobering symbol of the exploitation and degradation that Black women and their bodies have suffered for centuries. In this problematic comparison lie the troubling roots of the obsession with the Kardashian aesthetic.
![secret keepins pup white secret keepins pup white](https://media1.popsugar-assets.com/files/thumbor/3M_Q8BIuWoYdfJjpjx4-BGKJRkQ/fit-in/1200x630/filters:format_auto-!!-:strip_icc-!!-:fill-!white!-/2020/12/21/118/n/3019466/82e9f5fb5fe150dd871144.02667258_secretkeepin/i/Secret-Keepins.jpg)
![secret keepins pup white secret keepins pup white](https://www.ghostofthedoll.co.uk/Toys/SecretKeepins/Pink-3a---knot-a-toy.jpg)
This outsize fascination was perhaps best embodied by her controversial 2014 Paper magazine cover, shot by Jean-Paul Goude, where her bare bottom is flanked by the line, “Break the Internet Kim Kardashian.” On social media and in numerous think pieces, the cover drew comparisons to Saartjie Baartman, the 19th-century South African woman known as the “Hottentot Venus.” That the opener of the watershed reality show-which ends June 10 after 20 seasons-centered on the family’s fixation on Kim’s rear foreshadowed the now-ubiquitous public obsession with her body, and particularly that specific feature of it.