Iggy Azalea: ‘Plastic Surgery is an Emotional Journey’
Iggy Azalea talks plastic surgery and social media with Seventeen. (Photo: Max Abadian/Seventeen)
25-year-old musician Iggy Azalea is on the cover of the September 2015 issue of Seventeen, and she gets honest about her appearance. She looks different, and she’s going forth and telling everyone: She’s had plastic surgery, and she’s happy about it. Like all female pop stars, Azalea has been under intense scrutiny for her appearance, and she faced speculation about her nose when she appeared at the Billboard Music Awards in May. When asked about her nose job and the controversy surrounding it, she said, “I’m not denying it. Denying it is lame. I don’t think you should be ashamed if you made a change to yourself, which is why I’ve spoken about the changes I’ve made, like with my breasts.” When she first got plastic surgery on her breasts, she told Vogue that she was sick of padding her costumes. “At first she resolved never to discuss this publicly; she didn’t want girls — so many of her fans are barely high school age—to feel bad about their own bodies,” writer Lynn Yaeger noted. But Azalea was happy about them and didn’t want her plastic surgery to be construed as a source of shame.
The September 2015 cover of Seventeen with Iggy Azalea. (Photo: Max Abadian/Seventeen)
“Your perception of yourself can change a lot over time, so I think it’s important to wait and make sure it’s the right choice. Plastic surgery is an emotional journey,” she tells Seventeen. “It’s no easy feat to live with your flaws and accept yourself — and it’s no easy feat to change yourself. Either way you look at it, it’s a tough journey. There are things that I didn’t like about myself that I changed through surgery. There are other things I dislike but I’ve learned to accept. It’s important to remember you can’t change everything. You can never be perfect.“
Iggy Azalea before her nose job. (Photo: Getty)
As Seventeen’s readers are impressionable young women, Azalea, who was a teen not too long ago herself, also concedes that social media pressures young women to scrutinize themselves as much as they are scrutinized by other people. “It’s hard to be a woman in 2015 with social media. There’s so much more emphasis on taking pictures of ourselves and the ‘likes’ or people commenting on them,” she says. “There’s a lot more pressure to look beautiful. Some days I just want to look like s*** and feel okay with that.”
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