With plastic surgery, the possibility of changing one’s appearance is tempting — but desired results aren’t always guaranteed. Breast augmentation is the most popular cosmetic surgery procedure, and nearly 300,000 operations were performed in 2022 alone, according to data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Chrissy Teigen and Heidi Montag have both had breast work done multiple times; other celebrities like Ashley Tisdale and Tamra Judge have even experienced health scares after getting breast implants. From regretting their decisions to going through with “explants,” one thing’s for certain: Many stars would’ve done things differently if given the chance.
See who else has shared hard feelings about their breast implants and who has opted to remove them altogether.
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Rhylee Gerber
In August 2022, Rhylee Gerber shared via her Instagram Stories that she would be undergoing an explant procedure and documented her entire journey.
“I’m so ready to start feeling 100%,” the Below Deck star added. “I don’t even remember what 100% feels like anymore.”
On the morning of her big surgery, Gerber said, “I am tired of the inflammation. I am tired of the random, sharp pains … and I’m tired of bloating for no f—— reason.”
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Danica Patrick
In an April 2022 before-and-after Instagram post, Danica Patrick revealed she “wasn’t sure” if she was ready to share her experience, “but then I remembered that true vulnerability is sharing something you’re not really ready to. So here it is.”
The former NASCAR driver explained that she got her breast implants in November 2014, “because I want to have it all.”
“I was really fit, but I didn’t have boobs. So I got them,” she added. “Everything went well, and I was happy with them.”
In early 2018, though, Patrick started noticing her hair “was not as healthy and was breaking off,” and she started gaining “a few pounds and had no luck losing it.” Her problems only increased from there, and in late 2020, “the wheels came off,” she said.
“I had cycle irregularity, gained more weight, my hair wasn’t looking healthy at all and my face was a different shape (weird I know),” Patrick said. “So I went down the rabbit hole to figure it out. I did every test that could be done.”
Those symptoms led Patrick to have her implants removed.
“Within hours after surgery, this is what I noticed — my face had more color and less dark circles (no food before the second pic), my face started producing oil again, I could take a 30% deeper breath into my chest already, and I had so much energy when I woke up (and surgery was at 2:30 p.m.),” she wrote alongside the photos above.
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Mena Suvari
Mena Suvari opened up about removing her breast implants in her 2021 book, The Great Peace: A Memoir. Explaining the decision, the American Beauty actress said she felt compelled to make a change as she worked through her past traumas, including sexual and emotional abuse, having initially gotten the augmentation during that difficult time as a “distraction.”
In the years that followed, “I would catch myself so many times realizing, ‘I have these bags in my chest.’ And I didn’t have that connection as to why I truly did it. There was a lack of appreciation on my part,” Suvari told PEOPLE in 2021 of realizing she was unhappy with her body. “So I just sort of felt like, ‘Who am I and what am I doing?’ I had gone to this extent, to such extremes, looking for this identity.”
Admitting she was nervous before the three-hour procedure, the star said she felt free when she woke up and saw the implants on a side table as she was wheeled to the recovery room.
“Wow, there they are,” Suvari recalled herself thinking. “It was wild. I put those in there.”
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Clare Crawley
In July 2021, Clare Crawley revealed that she planned to remove her breast implants after experiencing numerous health concerns.
“I’ve been going through things medically with my body that I have not had answers to,” the Bachelorette alumna said on Instagram. “It’s been hard, it’s been frustrating and it’s been scary for me to not have answers and to know something’s not right.”
Crawley said that she’d privately dealt with a multitude of mystery symptoms at the time, including an itchy rash on her upper body and elevated white blood cell count.
“My skin has been having really bad hives and rash. My whole body is just inflamed and itchy. I’ve had blood test after blood test. That is not my only symptom,” she said. “It’s so frustrating.”
The reality star said that mammograms and an ultrasound showed sacs of fluid behind her implants. “As much as I love my implants, my body is fighting them and recognizes it as something obviously foreign in my body,” she said.
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Tamra Judge
Judge revealed in a June 2021 Instagram Story that she was getting her breast implants removed due to “autoimmune issues.”
“Bye bye bye boobies,” the Real Housewives of Orange County alumna wrote over a topless photo of herself, snapped at her pre-op appointment with longtime plastic surgery Dr. Milind Ambe of Newport Surgical Center, aptly choosing the *NSYNC song “Bye Bye Bye” to play alongside the post.
Judge went on to ask her followers to share their own explant stories, revealing in response to one of them that she’s looking forward to getting her health back on track.
“I can’t wait!” the mother of four wrote. “Tired of being tired and inflamed.”
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Hayley Hubbard
Hayley Hubbard, wife of Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard, had her breast implants removed in February 2021, and one month into her recovery, she decided to share her experience because it seemed to be a “hot topic.”
The podcaster explained that she wanted them removed out of concerns about the uptick in breast implant illnesses (BII), an emerging syndrome occurring in people with implants that can cause symptoms ranging from chronic fatigue to breathing problems to depression and hair loss, among others.
“I got mine removed because I had a textured gummy bear silicone implant, which they are not putting in people’s bodies anymore,” she said on her Instagram Story. “At the time when I got mine, they were the latest, the greatest, the most natural ever. Now they’re not. So that’s why I was just like, ‘I want to get them out.’ ”
“I don’t know that I was feeling badly; I’ve been pregnant for three years, so it could’ve been a number of things,” she added. “But just the anxiety of having them in my body was not worth it, and I wanted a more natural look.”
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Kayla Lochte
Kayla Lochte, wife of swimmer Ryan Lochte, had been struggling with a long list of health problems for years — everything from memory loss to depression, suicidal thoughts, bladder issues, swollen lymph nodes, vision issues and low libido — that led her to seek out help from multiple doctors in search of a cause. After a litany of tests, medications, treatments and therapy sessions, it became clear that she likely had BII and needed to have her implants removed.
So, on March 10, 2021, the Playboy model underwent a successful surgery to remove her implants, though doctors discovered a worrying issue.
“Surgery went well,” she told followers on her Instagram Story. “I wasn’t able to keep my implants, I wanted to take them home with me, but they think that — well, both of them were deflated, one more than the other, so they think that they were possibly leaking inside of me, so they have to send them back to the manufacturer.”
Lochte said she immediately started to improve once her implants were out. Doctors noticed that the dark circles under her eyes were gone, and her skin tone looked better, “which is just so crazy,” she said.
“It’s insanity, how much it was affecting me and how sick they were making me,” she shared, urging followers with implants who aren’t feeling well to consider getting an explant too.
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Ashley Tisdale
Tisdale opened up on Instagram in August 2020 about her decision to get her breast implants removed, citing “minor health issues that just were not adding up” such as “food sensitivities as well as gut issues … that I thought could be caused by my implants.”
“So, last winter I decided to undergo implant removal,” the High School Musical star explained.
“This journey has been one of growth, self discovery, self acceptance and most importantly self-love,” she continued. “This picture above was taken two months after my explant surgery and I think you can tell just how happy I am to finally be fully me.”
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Melissa Rycroft
Melissa Rycroft is “officially a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee again,” she wrote on Instagram. Rycroft announced on July 14, 2020, that she had her breast implants removed, sharing a photo of herself in the hospital after the surgery.
“Implants are OUT,” the Bachelor alumna wrote.
She explained that after previously undergoing reconstructive surgery, one of her implants “refused to settle right (even after reconstruction),” so she decided it was time to take them out for good. “My body was telling me they didn’t want these implants in!” the former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader said.
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Chrissy Teigen
Teigen opened up to Glamour UK in 2020 about getting breast implants when she was 20, sharing that she was motivated by her modeling career. “I thought, if I’m going to be posing, laid on my back, I want them to be perky! But then you have babies and they fill up with milk and deflate and now I am screwed,” the Cravings cookbook author explained, “I had a quarter ‘teardrop’ cup in the bottom and filled out the breast line. But I want them out now.”
Just a few months later, the now mother of four announced that she was following through on that decision. “I’m getting my boobs out!” she wrote on Instagram. “They’ve been great to me for many years but I’m just over it. I’d like to be able to zip a dress in my size, lay on my belly with pure comfort! No biggie!” she added. “So don’t worry about me! All good. I’ll still have boobs, they’ll just be pure fat. Which is all a tit is in the first place. A dumb, miraculous bag of fat.”
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Ayesha Curry
In the cover story of Working Mother‘s June/July 2019 issue, Ayesha Curry opened up about making “a rash decision” to get a breast augmentation after welcoming her second child, daughter Ryan Carson, in order to combat “a bit of postpartum … [that] came in the form of me being depressed about my body.”
The Full Plate cookbook author explained that her “intention was just to have them lifted” but she ultimately ended up “with these bigger boobs I didn’t want.”
“They’re worse now than they were before,” Curry said at the time, adding that, while she “would never do anything like that again,” she remains “an advocate” for other women to make their own choices about what works for them and their bodies.
Curry has since confirmed she’s had the implants removed.
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Gisele Bündchen
After breastfeeding her two children for 18 months each, Gisele Bündchen decided to discreetly go under the knife to correct what she felt were smaller, uneven breasts than she had pre-baby.
“I was always praised for my body, and I felt like people had expectations from me that I couldn’t deliver,” the supermodel told PEOPLE in 2018. “I felt very vulnerable, because I can work out, I can eat healthy, but I can’t change the fact that both of my kids enjoyed the left boob more than the right. All I wanted was for them to be even and for people to stop commenting on it.”
But in her 2018 memoir, Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life, the supermodel said she instantly regretted the move. “When I woke up, I was like, ‘What have I done?’ I felt like I was living in a body I didn’t recognize,” she said. “For the first year I wore [baggy] clothes because I felt uncomfortable.”
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Melissa Gilbert
After removing her breast implants in 2015, Melissa Gilbert told PEOPLE in 2018 that it was “one of the smartest things I’ve ever done.” The actress continued to stay on the natural track, eventually giving up on Botox and dyeing her hair as well.
Her perspective on aging changed when she fell in love with her husband, Timothy Busfield. “Through his inspiration, I found the courage to just be me,” she said, deciding to “age gracefully and appropriately and let my body and my face become whatever they are going to become.”
Gilbert also had her implants removed because she worried about them leaking as she got older. “What am I going to do when I’m in my 80s and I have to have a hip replacement but I also have my breast implants replaced?” she said. “Because it’s inevitable, they have a life span. So I wanted them out.”
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Crystal Hefner
Crystal Hefner, wife of late Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, underwent surgery in June 2016 to remove her eight-year-old breast implants after claiming they caused her aches, bladder pain, brain fog and fatigue. The model and deejay explained her health status on Facebook, saying she was deeply affected due to the implants, which she said had “slowly poisoned” her.
“Instantly I noticed my neck and shoulder pain was gone and I could breathe much better,” Hefner wrote following the implant removal procedure. “I know I won’t feel 100% overnight. My implants took 8 years to make me this sick, so I know it will take time to feel better.”
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Kourtney Kardashian
The Kardashians are known for being open about almost every aspect of their lives, so it was no surprise when the eldest Kardashian sibling, Kourtney, spoke about getting breast implants at age 22 on Keeping Up with the Kardashians. “I had my boobs done, but if I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it. I was so cute before,” she told Showbiz Spy in 2011, per the Daily Mirror. “I’ve realized that I was made to look a certain way and I’m considering removing them.”
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Heidi Montag
After undergoing 10 plastic surgery procedures in one day and unveiling her new look in a 2010 issue of PEOPLE, Montag — who once described herself as “beyond obsessed” with fine-tuning her look — underwent breast augmentation three years later, downsizing from size F breasts to size D.
“I would never do it again and I never recommend it for anyone,” the Hills star told Access Hollywood in 2012, as reported by Today. “I kind of wanted a few enhancements and then it kind of got out of hand. I wasn’t told really the repercussions and what would happen, emotionally and psychically and the pain I would be in. I was kind of in shock.”
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Yolanda Hadid
As a vocal Lyme disease activist, Yolanda Hadid used her celebrity on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills to raise awareness about the invisible illness, as well as showcase her search for a cure.
After discovering that her breast implants had been leaking, the mother of supermodels Bella Hadid and Gigi Hadid decided to get the implants removed, citing a possible link to her ongoing health crisis.
“We might have hit the jackpot by finding all this silicone from a 20 year old implant rupture through ultrasound mapping as shown in this selfie,” she wrote on Instagram in August 2015. “Thank you [Dr. Feng] for holding my hand and leading the way.”
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Pamela Anderson
Although Pamela Anderson is known for her curvaceous figure, she revealed getting breast implants was her No. 1 cosmetic regret.
“Not that we need to point it out,” the Baywatch star said, rolling her eyes toward her chest in a 2016 W magazine interview. She famously underwent surgery to remove her implants in 1999. “It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time and I’m very happy with my decision,” she shared following the procedure, per the Chicago Tribune.
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Tori Spelling
Tori Spelling got candid about her breast implants in a 2011 Good Morning America interview. “I got my boobs done in my early 20s, and if I had known it would or could possibly impact production of [breast] milk, I would never have had them done,” the now mother of five said. Spelling would eventually get her implants removed following a doctor consultation in 2014, which was documented on her reality show, True Tori.
In 2022, the Beverly Hills, 90210 star announced she would be getting her breast implants replaced. “I got them when I was really young. And I didn’t know that at a certain point they would have an expiration. I didn’t know that you would have to do it again,” Spelling told E! News. “It really hit home for me when my daughter came to me and she’s like, ‘Mom, I’m concerned. You have put this off. You told me for years now that you need to get your boobs redone.’ ”
Spelling said it was a 2011 Food and Drug Administration advisory warning women of the “local complications” of silicone gel-filled breast implants — which the FDA also linked to a rare type of cancer — prompted her to take the matter more seriously.
After years of putting it off, the actress said she was scheduled to undergo the procedure on Feb. 27, 2022.
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Victoria Beckham
While Victoria Beckham is relatively private, the Spice Girls alumna and fashion designer didn’t remain quiet when asked about her augmented bustline. “I don’t have them anymore,” she told Allure in 2014, after being shown an old photo of her that included ample décolletage. “I think I may have purchased them,” she explained, adding: “Or they got removed, one or the other.”
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Heather Morris
What started out as a dream for Heather Morris eventually turned into something she could no longer stand.
“Implants were something I thought I wanted when I was younger, and now I don’t,” the Glee alumna told Fitness magazine in 2011, per HuffPost. “It was hard being active with them, because my chest was always sore. It hurt a lot, and I didn’t like always being in pain, so they had to go!”
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Karen McDougal
Karen McDougal originally decided to get breast implants in 1996 to boost her self-esteem, but seven years after the procedure, McDougal started having thyroid and adrenal problems, developed severe allergies, and began getting sick constantly.
“I would get sick every couple of months and be sick for six to eight weeks at a time,” the former Playboy model told PEOPLE in 2017. “It just never went away.” She would eventually attribute her symptoms to her breast implants, which led to her decision to get them removed.
“It took me 20 years to get ‘poisoned,’ so it’s not going to be an overnight process,” McDougal shared, adding that she immediately began feeling better after the surgery. “I still have to go through a detox process to get rid of all the toxins in my body, but it’s definitely an improvement. I feel like I can actually live and enjoy life now.”
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Kimberly Holland
Kimberly Holland, another former Playboy model, decided to get her breast implants removed after a friend of hers had her own bout with BII.
Holland initially got breast implants in 2004, but she didn’t experience any issues until she got them replaced with silicon “gummy bear” implants in 2012.
“I just wanted them out,” Holland, who developed Raynaud’s disease after getting her first set of implants replaced, told PEOPLE in 2017. “I didn’t want to waste any more of my time or my health. There was no point in waiting. I have a son who’s a toddler — I need to be around and be healthy.”
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SZA
SZA shared in March 2024 that her family’s history of breast cancer prompted her to get explants. “When I got my boobs done, my doctor took out some of my fibrosis, but … there was so much fibrosis, it was crazy,’ ” the “Kill Bill” singer said. “And he took it out. And so, when I went back, a lot of the concerns were gone.”
The musician, whose mother and aunt were both diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent mastectomies, said she wasn’t supposed to get breast implants due to the markers she had in her breasts for her fibrosis.
“So basically, I put them in. They ended up hurting me,” SZA explained. “I got way too much scar tissue because my breasts are too dense and I’m not supposed to have breast implants. And so I ended up getting extra fibrosis like with tissue, whatever, and I didn’t feel good and it was painful. So, I took them out, and now, they’re just my boobs.”
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Kylie Jenner
Playing Summer Quinn on Baywatch in the ‘90s wasn’t at all what Nicole Eggert expected it to be. She shared as much in an exclusive January 2024 interview with PEOPLE wherein she reflected on her insecurities about her body while playing the lifeguard, which required her to wear bathing suits regularly.
“All the girls worked out and were super tiny and fit and I was like ‘Whoops.’ And the one-piece bathing suits were not flattering. I didn’t want to wear it at all,” said Eggert, who, at 18, decided to have breast implants when the show took a break from filming.
“I regret it now, of course,” she admitted. “I look at all these younger girls doing it and think, ‘God, leave your bodies alone!’ But when you have to put on that one-piece and it’s like you’re so flat that it’s like pleating — you got pleats across the front … you’re like, ‘What is this?’ Nothing you can do.”
In the same interview, the Charles in Charge star shared she had been diagnosed with stage 2 cribriform carcinoma breast cancer in early December 2023 after experiencing pain in her left breast two months prior.
Source: People
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