She’s also opened up about her anorexia and depression
Bella Hadid has admitted that she regrets her decision to get a nose job at the age of 14. In an emotional and honest interview with Vogue, the model opened up about her health struggles, depression and burnout, and past experiences with an eating disorder. She also addressed the rumours about various cosmetic surgeries she’s had that are rife on the internet.
From eye lifts to jaw shaving, Hadid has been accused of a myriad of cosmetic procedures by the slew of Instagram and TikTok accounts claiming to expose celebrity surgeries. Hadid has denied almost all of it, saying the ongoing speculation has given her imposter syndrome. “People think I fully fucked with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy,” she said in the interview. “I have never used filler. Let’s put an end to that.” She also says there’s no truth to the eyelift rumours: “it’s face tape! The oldest trick in the book.”
The one procedure Hadid does admit to, a nose job at the young age of 14, she says she regrets. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she says. “I think I would have grown into it.” While she doesn’t discuss the circumstances around the nose job, she shares in the interview that growing up she felt she was living in Gigi’s shadow.
“I was the uglier sister. I was the brunette. I wasn’t as cool as Gigi, not as outgoing,” she says. “When you get told things so many times, you do just believe it. I always ask myself, how did a girl with incredible insecurities, anxiety, depression, body-image issues, eating issues, who hates to be touched, who has intense social anxiety – what was I doing getting into this business?”
Continuing to be very candid, Hadid discusses the numerous and endless physical and psychiatric symptoms she has suffered as a result of her Lyme disease, babesiosis (a tick-borne parasitic infection of red blood cells), adrenal fatigue and hypothyroidism for which she is on hormone replacement.
When Hadid was in high school, she was prescribed Adderall which she says pushed her into anorexia. “I was on this calorie-counting app, which was like the devil to me,” she shared. “I’d pack my little lunch with my three raspberries, my celery stick. I was just trying, I realise now, to feel in control of myself when I felt so out of control of everything else.” Working in the fashion industry hasn’t helped. “I remember a stylist talking about my weight because I couldn’t zip up. Looking back, I think, yeah, because a Saint Laurent sample size from the runway was just not a real size for anybody. But then you think there’s something wrong with you.”
Alongside the physical conditions, Hadid discusses how childhood traumas have left her unable to remember broad swathes of her early years, as well as the burnout she experienced last January which left her in suicidal despair and spending two weeks in a treatment program. She is now on antidepressant medication, Wellbutrin, which she takes alongside doing therapy. “For three years while I was working, I would wake up every morning hysterical, in tears, alone,” she recalls. “I wouldn’t show anybody that. I would go to work, cry at lunch in my little green room, finish my day, go to whatever random little hotel I was in for the night, cry again, wake up in the morning, and do the same thing.”
Read the full interview here.