Kardashian Grrls

I have a guilty pleasure – I am a closeted (or not so closeted) watcher of the Kardashian reality shows.  I’m not sure how it happened – was it the heat waves this summer, my own minor surgery, too many boring baskets of ironing to plow through – however it happened, thanks to streaming and Netflix, I was able to watch all six seasons in a sort of mindless daze. 

That’s an awful lot of Kardashian at once.  Part of the fascination, I admit, is that I am part Armenian myself.  I thought it was cool that these dark-eyed, ebony-haired young women with features so much like my own were seen as super-glamorous, hot reality-show celebs.  After all, I grew up in the era of the Clairol commercials, “Is it true blondes have more fun?”  Although I have long reconciled with that media blitz and truly do like my own more exotic heritage, stuff like that sticks with you.  So part of it is that I love seeing the Kardashians described as “gorgeous” and “hot”.  It wasn’t so very long ago that brunettes couldn’t possibly be gorgeous or hot, unless they were movie stars.

Then one afternoon, out of curiosity, I googled their father, Robert Kardashian.  I remembered him from the O.J. Simpson trial.  And I was surprised to find this picture of Kim Kardashian with her father:

Kim is reportedly around fourteen years old when this picture was taken.  I think she looks a lot older – more like twenty.  But what struck me was her beauty, natural and pretty much unadorned.  She doesn’t really look anything like this Kim Kardashian:

Obviously, she is older in this picture.  But her nose, which looks so much like my own in the picture with her father, looks narrower.  Her  eyes look narrower, too – is that because she’s wearing her famous pointy false eyelashes?  And she has a sort of world-weary look about her.  That sweetness, that innocence, that exotic girl-next-door quality, is totally gone.  Now she has breast implants that she shows off at every opportunity, a boadacious butt (there was even one episode of the Kardashians that “proved” Kim hasn’t had butt implants by showing her butt getting x-rayed), and wears so much make-up that when they show her without it she is practically unrecognizable.

Whether or not Kim Kardashian has had plastic surgery is hotly debated on websites that are devoted to that sort of thing.  I think, looking at the picture of herself with her father, that it’s pretty indisputable that she has.  She still looks Armenian, but she’s taken the stamp of authenticity off herself.  Now she looks like a Hugh Hefner version of a beautiful Armenian/American babe.  And I think she’s lost something in the process.