Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is rib recontouring and why is it controversial?
Hello and welcome to a very different episode of the Maths Funny podcast and what's going to be the first episode in a new little investigation series. I'm recording this intro right now in a hotel room in Bali. I just met Beck who has also just landed in Bali ahead of undergoing what is possibly one of the most controversial new cosmetic surgeries out there. I'm starting to feel nervous Josh.
What am I doing? Uh-oh. Well, this isn't a holiday, is it? It's not a holiday. I'm nervous, but I can't wait. The things we do for beauty. And over the next 24 hours, 10 more leading Australian influencers are going to arrive here, all to undergo the same procedure. What if this is a big, big mistake? Which I didn't even know existed until a couple of months ago.
And it isn't even yet available in Australia. But you can always say no at any point. I can. I can say no at any point. Now, I imagine you're quite confused listening to this right now. And don't worry, because I have been too. So I'm going to take you to the very start of how I even ended up here in Bali investigating the actual reality of this latest craze.
I think we can call it in the cosmetic surgery world, which, trust me, very soon you will not be able to escape in the press and in your news feeds. Okay, to take this back to the very, very, very start, as some of you may know, my media career started in the world of celebrity magazines back in the UK many years ago.
At 21, I was offered an internship at a gossip magazine in London to help with their social media. Within two weeks, the team on that magazine offered me the role of junior writer. I said to them when they offered me that, like, yo, I actually, like, I don't know how to write or interview people or any of that. I dropped out of school.
But the editors told me that that was okay because I apparently had the most important thing, which was passion. And they said, like, take the job, Josh, and we will teach you to be a proper journalist on the go. And yeah, they did. And within a year of taking that junior writer role, I'd been promoted twice to the senior writer. I was nominated for rising star at the British Media Awards.
And I was suddenly doing all the big, cover features for the magazine every single week. Hi, I'm Josh from Now Magazine and today I'm joined by the queen that is Paris Hilton. Hi. So we're in London with Zoella.
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Chapter 2: Who are the Australian influencers participating in the procedure?
Hello. And back then when my editors were training me, they shared with me the biggest secret behind every celebrity interview and magazine. And that was that I must ask every female celebrity about the freebies. which are boys, babies, and bodies. AKA boys, like I'd sit down with someone and be like, yo, tell me about your love life. What's going on there?
Because, you know, we all love a gossip and gossip sells. Babies, I would have to ask, like, do you have kids? Do you want kids? Do you want to freeze your eggs if you haven't got a partner? Would you do IVF? Like all these things, because I was told most of our readers are mothers. So anything on that topic will resonate with our readers. and then bodies.
And I was told by my editors, I must ask every female celebrity, are you on a diet? Have you lost weight? Have you put weight on? Have you had any work done? What work would you like done? I was even told to ask them like, hey, what do you hate most about your body? And if you could change anything right now, like what would you change?
And back then my editors explained to me that we must do that because having someone rich and famous talk about an insecurity would make our regular life
everyday readers feel better about themselves and it would also make the celebrity that little bit more relatable but gradually over the years I slowly realized that that just wasn't true and I realized I was told to ask the celebrities those questions so we the magazine we could exploit it
their insecurities for profit while pushing out these unrealistic beauty standards onto the unsuspecting public who bought into every diet every fitness program and every cosmetic procedure that our magazine and every magazine back then pushed out on the cover every single week
And everything we did was part of like this twisted, self-proclaimed body positivity movement that did nothing but essentially just made people feel worse about themselves and the celebs included. And... Back then, I'll admit, I didn't know any better. And it took me years to think like, hey, should we be reducing every woman out there down to these three topics as if that's all they are?
And like back then again, I was a kid and I was grateful to have what I thought was my dream job, especially because I didn't go to uni. I didn't study like this kind of just...
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Chapter 3: What led the host to investigate cosmetic surgery in Bali?
fell in my lap and those in charge like the editors who were training me they all had decades of editorial experience under their belts and to me and to all the other young staff who I suppose are my age and are now maybe leading new publications in this new form of media Like back then, the editors, what they told us, their word was gospel.
But now more than ever, I've essentially realized just how problematic that all was. And even my small part of it all, which is why I think this little Bali podcast series you're about to listen to is important.
But before we get to this, now in Bali, me working at that magazine and then as a showbiz journalist for years, I essentially had a front row seat to every plastic surgery craze that came and went. And like, especially through my regular, often weekly interviews with people like Katie Price in the UK and Charlotte Crosby from London.
Geordie Shore which I continued doing once I moved to Australia and some of you may actually remember me from briefly appearing on the Charlotte Crosby show during an episode where um Charlotte was mid breakup quite emotional and her management while she was in Sydney thought ah great Charlotte's vulnerable and a bit of a mess let's bring Josh in who she knows like to just interview her about the breakup I feel like shit but I've got one last interview to do at least I've been interviewed by this guy before
She's awful. Sometimes I just don't want to talk about it. I can't do it.
Yeah, that was a weird episode. But back to the point. I spent years interviewing Charlotte and in those interviews, I documented every little tweak that she made to her body. And every time we did a new interview and she was telling me about whatever she'd done, I did always think to myself, is any of this necessary? Why are we, or why are you, why is anyone doing this to themselves?
Hi, everyone. I'm in Australia. I think what everyone really wants to know is about my new nose. Woo! Shiny, glittering, the unicorns. It looks best from the side view, so... And every time Charlotte got something new done and she would proudly share it through people like me, then, you know, we'd put that content out and people would respond, not always positively... which is expected.
And then we, as the magazine, we'd do another piece on that with a headline like, Charlotte hits back at the trolls just to keep fanning those flames of outrage. And a lot of the time though, what the media and the magazines and even like the Daily Mail will say in headlines is cruel trolls. It's often not cruel trolls. It's just regular people going, yo, I don't think this is healthy.
And should we be pushing this? onto young girls and of course i am a big believer in your body your choice everyone is entitled to do what makes them happy or do what brings them a confidence that they've always lacked or you know whatever but where is the line between self-love and just an endless search for validation i had i had a nose job
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Chapter 4: How did the host's media career shape their views on beauty standards?
I don't want to go back and have more surgery because there's nothing else I want to change. I think if you're a bit of an insecure person or you're unhappy with a lot of things on your body, then yeah. But I don't know whether it is addictive. When I first started in this industry at that magazine, age 21, it was all about the breast implants or... the bolt-ons as they were called back then.
And there was obviously nose jobs and lipo in the mix too, which back then they were like the two of the most popular procedures out there for people wanting to change their appearance. And they were like the original holy trinity of procedures for people in the spotlight.
But then along came the Kardashians and Instagram, and suddenly it was all about lip filler and then cheek filler and filler everywhere. And then after that, it was the Brazilian bum lift, which to me, again, is when this pursuit of perfection, it just started to seem like extreme and dangerous.
There's something called the Brazilian butt lift, which is fat transfer to the buttocks, and it has the highest death rate in plastic surgery. Like it got to the point where you've got young girls literally killing themselves in a bid to try and look like other girls they've seen on Instagram.
Now though, and as some of you may have noticed, over the last couple of years, their desire for big breasts and a big bum has been replaced by a more natural look. And one leading plastic surgeon in Australia I spoke to while researching for this podcast series He told me that people are now craving and paying a lot of money for more conservative looks.
And most of his clients are now chasing subtle looks over those extreme ones of recent years. And they go to him wanting smaller chests and smaller behinds and a smaller waist or as it's now known, the snatched waist. And for a brief period of time, the snatched waist was done through rib removal, which is extreme.
and dangerous to the point that around the world, most surgeons just flat out refuse to perform that procedure because of the risks associated. But over the last few years, the apparent safe alternative to this has taken off, and especially in America, and this is known technically as rib recontouring, but across social media, and especially TikTok, it's called the snatched waste.
If I could only pick one underrated procedure in body contouring, it's rib remodeling. And the reason why I say that is because rib remodeling is an innovative technique that allows us to further sculpt the body in ways that were previously unavailable to us.
Even though liposuction is a very effective technique at sculpting the body and slimming the waistline, rib remodeling allows us to take it one step
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