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As Page Six Instagram posts go, a January 16 image of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards, with a caption about her mirror selfie “stripped down to a black bikini,” was fairly unremarkable. “The #Bravolebrity appears to be on a health kick in 2023,” the caption read, in part. The comments, however, were filled with another theory about Richards’ “toned” physique: that she’s been using Ozempic.
Ozempic, of course, is the self-injected drug designed to treat diabetes that’s widely reported to have become Hollywood’s latest strategy for weight loss, sourced from doctors willing to prescribe it off-label even amidst a growing shortage of the medication for people who actually need it.
“Nobody believes u Kyle,” said one commenter on the post. “It is unlikely that a 54 year old woman maintains a six-pack without pharmacological help,” said another. “O-o-o-Ozempic,” chimed in yet another, nodding to the ear-worm jingle that accompanies the TV ads for the drug, which is officially marketed at people with diabetes, to help manage blood sugar levels. The same medication, semaglutide, formulated in a higher dose is named Wegovy, which is marketed for weight loss for obese patients.
This is a common response to images of celebrities right now. As news of Ozempic’s off-label effect of dramatic weight loss has spread, so too have the rumours about its use by various famous people—mostly women—whose “transformation” timelines (from thin to…even thinner) seem to mirror this drug’s emergence. Mindy Kaling and Kim and Khloé Kardashian are favourite targets of this sniping. In certain corners of celebrity watching, it’s practically a sport to “spot” which famous person is the latest to walk a red carpet suddenly looking even thinner.
What’s less common is the fact that Kyle Richards herself directly responded to the accusations (she since appears to have deleted her responses). “I am NOT taking Ozempic. Never have,” she replied to one comment. “I’m honest about what I do,” she wrote in a reply to another, referring to the breast reduction surgery she talked about having last year.
She’s not the first celebrity who has felt the need to deny using Ozempic. Earlier this month, on her own Instagram account, Khloé Kardashian responded to a commenter who called her very thin body “disturbing,” and attributed it to taking Ozempic. “Let’s not discredit my years of working out,” Kardashian wrote. “I get up 5 days a week at 6 am to train…Please stop with your assumptions.”
“My anti-aging doctor just hands it out to anybody…She said, ‘If you ever want to drop five pounds, this is good.’”
Then there’s Chelsea Handler, who has admitted that she did take Ozempic but…didn’t know she was on it! This week, Handler said on the Call Her Daddy podcast that the drug is so widely used and easily available in Hollywood that “my anti-aging doctor just hands it out to anybody…She said, ‘If you ever want to drop five pounds, this is good.’”
Not knowing what it was, Handler injected herself with it after a vacation—as nonchalantly as one might pop a collagen supplement, it seems—then felt nauseous at lunch with a friend, a common side effect. Her friend, who was also on Ozempic, and also nauseous, connected the dots.
The story gets one step weirder: While Handler stopped taking the medication when she realized it was “not right for me,” she gave her leftover doses to friends, which is certainly not medically advised. “I’ve injected about four or five of my friends with Ozempic because I realized I didn’t want to use it cause it’s silly,” she said. “Everyone is on Ozempic. It’s going to backfire, something bad is going to happen.”
British actress and activist Jameela Jamil agrees that the widespread use of Ozempic is dangerous, and has taken to Instagram multiple times since December to address what she called the “viral weight loss injections” she claims most of her peers are using. “I’m seeing people really struggle because of this stuff,” she wrote, pointing to possible side effects like nausea and issues with digestion, gall bladder and thyroid function. She said “slim women” in the industry are paying thousands of dollars for the drug to get “super skinny,” in part because they feel pressure to fit into tiny sample sizes of designer clothes they’re expected to wear for photo shoots and red carpets to promote their projects.
Whether or not Richards, Kardashian or any other celebrity has used Ozempic isn’t really the point. Their body, their choice. The fact that they feel the need to deny it, vigorously? Now that’s fascinating. Our collective obsession with Ozempic, as a stand-in for our obsession with the aesthetic appearance of women’s bodies, has led to a kind of witch hunt over who has or hasn’t taken it, with truth-seeking hoards sniffing out semaglutide behind every door in L.A.—and its glossy citizens are feeling the heat.
It’s reminiscent of how, a decade or so ago, we were utterly obsessed with whether or not a celebrity had had “work done.” This was before injectables like Botox and fillers went mainstream, thanks in large part to celebrities using them, resulting in a normalization we’re now likely to see with these weight loss drugs.
If you were around in Snapchat’s heady early days, you’ll remember the Kylie Jenner lips saga, where for an entire year she insisted she achieved her oversized pout purely through the magic of lip pencils—which, of course, she conveniently sold—until she “admitted” that she did, in fact, use filler. (Nearly as harmful as that lie, which basically gaslit millions of young girls, was how incredibly drying those Kylie Lip Kits were.)
Since then, thousands of other celebrities have faced speculation over whether they’ve altered their appearance using plastic surgery. At first it came via tabloid articles proclaiming they’re “unrecognizable.” Later, the fight was taken up by the countless blogs, then Instagram (and now TikTok) accounts that compile celebrity “before and after” plastic surgery pictures that point out all the subtle and not-so-subtle procedures—from buccal fat removal to forehead reduction—that famous people may or may not have done to artificially enhance the looks that are, in many cases, the reason they make millions and we don’t.
So why is there so much interest in ferreting out these things—and why does it feel like such a thrill when we think we’ve found them out? Enter the concept of “hidden work,” an umbrella term for the secret labour that most women (and celebrities in particular) feel they’re expected to do to remain pleasing to society’s gaze. The idea that all women’s bodies should be as hairless as an eel is a classic example of this.
“It’s a long-standing problem for women in the public eye.”
Dr. Milly Williamson, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths University in London whose research has focused on celebrity and the media, says that female celebrities act as a “mirror” to the pressures that women face more broadly in a patriarchal society. “Being a woman is an impossible role,” says Williamson. “She’s supposed to be naturally beautiful, but actually physically is no more ‘naturally’ beautiful than a man, so she has to work at creating herself—and can also be shamed and derided for doing so.” The “impossible creature” trope, she points out, has existed since at least the 1780s, applied to female actors in English theatre. “It’s a long-standing problem for women in the public eye.”
Williamson ties the Ozempic discourse to the idea that a woman should be “naturally” thin, and “anyone who isn’t is at fault.” This is how we get into situations where, say, an influencer whose thinness is called out repeatedly in comments speculating she has an eating disorder might make a great show of all the cupcakes and croissants she “totally eats all the time.” It’s very murky stuff, especially when mental health disorders around eating and body image are present.
The same impulse leads to the cruel mockery of celebrities who take plastic surgery “too far,” punishing them for doing “too much” of the thing that nonsensical standards around aging pushed them to feel was necessary in the first place. The same mob that was telling a celebrity she looked haggard last month is the one that’s mocking her “frozen face” this week. It extends to the celebrity who takes a weight loss drug to meet the prevailing body standard, only to be told she has done something wrong. As Williamson puts it, “women are supposed to be naturally thin, and you can’t admit to having to work at that.”
We’re in a strange moment when awareness and critique of damaging diet culture abounds, and the body positivity movement has made tremendous strides in creating a more accepting, inclusive world, in some corners at least. At the same time, we still live in a world where thinness is highly valued and comes with great privilege: fatphobia is very much alive and well.
For Williamson, this points to the limits of the body positive movement in particular, because “it insists that women are bodies, and we should be judged as bodies, and it doesn’t really get beyond that.” The problem with that? We live “in a culture which always finds fault with the female body.” As well, it makes the pressure to hide body modification even more intense. “It’s doubled because women don’t want to somehow also be seen as the enemy of body positivity.”
The rise of wellness culture is one more complicating factor. The notion that celebrities achieve their appearance through virtuous lifestyle choices alone—Khloé Kardashian’s 6 a.m. workouts, “clean” eating, yoga, Jennifer Lopez’s facial application of olive oil—creates the illusion of a level playing field, crucial in an era when “authenticity” and “relatability” are everything. Finding out that a celebrity you wish you could look like has a secret cheat beyond the daily Bikram yoga and meditation they claim? Gratifying!
That schadenfreude is something media and social media are primed to exploit. “Tabloids really like to bring stars down to earth,” says Williamson. “There’s a long trope in reporting of finding the volatile, finding the misbehaving and making use of that.” The use, of course, is click bait articles or posts that play into social media algorithms that have been shown to prioritize serving up content that generates strong reactions.
We are conditioned, on a very deep level, to surveil ourselves and others.
It wasn’t that long ago—2009, to be precise—that Kate Moss said in an interview that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” There was some backlash at the time, but hardly the uproar it would generate today, and the phrase went on to be named one of Cosmo’s “Best celebrity quotes” of the year. (More recently, Moss has expressed regret over it.) In less than 15 years, a famous person saying something like that has become unthinkable—but we still live in a world where bodies larger than a size 2 are nowhere near the norm in entertainment or fashion, and we’re still just as obsessed with how celebrities get and stay so thin.
This obsession with figuring out who’s taking Ozempic—and calling them out—may be a by-product of our own conflicted feelings about body standards, a catharsis, a way of working through our own internalized fatphobia. “It’s an interesting speculation on how people engage with these kinds of images,” says Williamson of this theory. “Women are expected to judge ourselves, and judge other women.” She mentions the famous quote by art critic John Berger: “Men look at women, and women watch themselves being looked at.” She builds on it by adding, “Women watch other women being looked at as well.” We are conditioned, on a very deep level, to surveil ourselves and others.
It’s only once we move beyond that mindset that determines our value by how conventionally attractive we are that we’ll see the end of this cycle, of which Ozempic is just the latest horse on the merry go round. “Why are our bodies the focus of how we understand ourselves and each other?” asks Williamson. “That’s what we have to stop.”
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