Bella Hadid addressed the rumors about her appearance and plastic surgery head-on for the first time, while also speaking openly about her struggles with depression and self-acceptance.
In a new cover story for Vogue, the supermodel confirmed that she did have a nose job when she was 14 years old and it's a decision she seriously regrets to this day. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she explained. “I think I would have grown into it.”
But despite assumptions she's also done everything from getting her eyes lifted to having her jaw shaved, Hadid says none of that is true. “People think I fully fucked with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy. I’m pretty sure you don’t look the same now as you did at 13, right? I have never used filler. Let’s just put an end to that. I have no issue with it, but it’s not for me.” She continued, “Whoever thinks I’ve gotten my eyes lifted or whatever it’s called—it’s face tape! The oldest trick in the book. I’ve had this impostor syndrome where people made me feel like I didn’t deserve any of this. People always have something to say, but what I have to say is, I’ve always been misunderstood in my industry and by the people around me.”
And all of those opinions about her appearance definitely weigh on Hadid who says that she began to notice her mood changing around January 2021. “My immediate trauma response is people-pleasing. It literally makes me sick to my stomach if I leave somewhere and someone is unhappy with me, so I always go above and beyond, but the issue with that is that I get home and I don’t have enough for myself,” she confessed. “I became manic. I bleached my hair. I looked like a troll doll. Then I dyed it—it looked like a sunrise. That should have been the first sign.”
After weeks of waking up near-suicidal, Hadid spent two and a half weeks at a treatment program in Tennessee. There, she began incorporating therapy and Wellbutrin into her routine, both of which she says have completely changed her life. She explained, “For so long, I didn’t know what I was crying about. I always felt so lucky, and that would get me even more down on myself. There were people online saying, You live this amazing life. So then how can I complain? I always felt that I didn’t have the right to complain, which meant that I didn’t have the right to get help, which was my first problem.”
Last September, at the first sign of another burnout during New York Fashion Week, Hadid pulled out of all her commitments and went to visit her mom's farm in Pennsylvania to reconnect with herself. She said, “When you are forced to be perfect every day, in every picture, you start to look at yourself and need to see perfection at all times, and it’s just not possible. That month off was really helpful for me.” Concluding, “Now, everything that I do in my personal life is literally to make sure that my mental state stays above water. Fashion can make you or break you. And if it makes you, you have to make a conscious effort every day for it not to break you. There’s always a bit of grief in love.”
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