Channel 5 has received thousands of Ofcom complaints after releasing a documentary detailing Geordie Shore star Charlotte Crosby’s plastic surgery.
The one-hour episode, titled Celebrities – What Happened to your Face, saw surgeons and doctors dissecting Crosby’s face, speculating on the procedures she may have had done.
“An outrage”
Fans and friends of Crosby called the show an “outrage”, and shortly after Crosby took to social media to vent her disgust at the show’s content.
Not only did the show discuss Crosby’s appearance in an offensive and potentially triggering way, they explicitly went against her agent’s pleas not to take the show to broadcast.
She said: “I have had a public battle with my appearance, and have had to go through personal trauma and issues of self-confidence in the spotlight.”
She continued: “At a time when the broadcast and media world were backing a policy of ‘be kind’, Channel 5 & Crackit decided to commission this one hour special on ‘rubber lip Charlotte’.”
Not only did the show discuss Crosby’s appearance in an offensive and potentially triggering way, they explicitly went against her agent’s pleas not to take the show to broadcast.
Crosby said in her post that when her agent found out about the show, “she very clearly outlined to Crackit Productions not just how immoral and insensitive it was but how detrimental this would be to my mental health. They ignored her, despite repeated correspondence, and ran with it regardless. We only found out this week when it was in the TV listings that it was still going ahead.”
Crosby was forced to watch so-called experts insult her facial features and weight, while a selection of offensive comments made by online trolls flashed across the screen, against her consent and with no prior warning. Even those who are not fans of Charlotte’s can easily recognise the distress this was bound to cause.
How do we represent plastic surgery on TV?
With children developing eating disorders and body image issues at younger and younger ages, it’s vital to highlight the role filters and plastic surgery play in creating the celebrity faces idolised by social media and the press. Young people who aspire to have ski-slope noses, large lips and thin waists should be made aware of the potential dangers of surgery, from permanent loss of smell to bursting implants, scarring and even death.
However, there are ways to draw attention to these dangers without focusing on one particular celebrity’s “botched” procedures. These programmes could cast individuals who are happy to discuss their surgery choices on screen, as opposed to scraping together footage of a celebrity against their will.
Be kind
“Be Kind” has become a common mantra following the death of Caroline Flack, and after Chadwick Boseman died of cancer and it was revealed that chemotherapy caused his sudden weight loss, droves of people vowed never to judge once-buff and muscular men by their appearance.
It didn’t take long, though, before social media users were piling on Zac Efron for his new appearance in a promo video for an upcoming Netflix musical, making jokes about his weight gain and suggesting he had “ruined” his face with plastic surgery since his High School Musical days.
These reactions highlight the fragility of the “Be Kind” motto. Social media users all too quickly give in to the temptation to make memes and jokes about a celebrity, not realising or forgetting how easily these comments can affect the person in question. The final line of Crosby’s post – “fortunately, I’m strong enough to deal with it, but many aren’t” – underlines this brilliantly.
A vicious cycle
“As a society, we need to stop engaging with these appearance-based narratives in the media”
It’s a classic, vicious cycle; someone gets praised for their appearance and begins to attach their sense of worth to their beauty, becoming fearful of ageing and losing the face which has helped them climb to fame. They then have fillers or Botox to maintain their looks, only for the press and media to mock them for how much work they’ve had done and how “unnatural” they now look. This scenario is lose-lose, though, because celebrities are equally criticised by trolls and tabloids when they do start to develop wrinkles or go grey, with headlines questioning “what went wrong”.
As a society, we need to stop engaging with these appearance-based narratives in the media – both the critical and the complimentary – so that they stop being commissioned, published and shared. We need to find better ways of advertising the dangers inherent in plastic surgery, and teaching young people that they don’t need to fit into a narrow definition of beauty, without judging those who make the personal choice to have work done.
As Crosby powerfully noted in her post, “That hour could have been used to host a mental health documentary.” We need to completely switch the ways we think, write and talk about beauty and plastic surgery. Instead of tearing individuals down for the way they look, we should be uplifting activists, writers, and speakers for the words they have to say, creating a whole new set of role models for young people.
Alice Hiley
Image courtesy of Diana Polekhina on Unsplash. Image license can be found here. No changes were made to the image.