Michelle Visage is sharing an emotional experience with plastic surgery and the ultimate reason she had her breast implants removed.
The RuPaul’s Drag Race judge panelist sat down for an interview with Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Adrienne Banfield-Norris on their series Red Table Talk.
During their Visage told the hosts that she had three breast augmentations over several decades to achieve the “boobs of my dreams." However she decided to have the implants removed after her Hashimoto’s thyroiditis diagnosis.
The condition is an autoimmune disease that damages the thyroid gland.
“It happened pretty soon after my first set of implants, and so my journey started there,” Visage explained. “I would have these flare-ups where I would gain a ton of weight – my body would go bloat up and down.”
She recalled questioning her doctors about her implants and how it could be affecting the condition which resulted in her “my body is attacking an invader."
Visage suspected the implants might be causing the flare-ups but one doctor advised her not to remove them because they wanted to make sure it wasn’t something else.
“After 20 plus years of chasing my health, constantly continuously things getting worse and I couldn’t understand why, that was my last step,” Visage said.
She described how she always thought her “breasts were always part of the fun” and “caricatureness” of her identity, but she has come to love the way her body looks now.
But the removal of implants not only left Visage with noticeable physical differences but also a shift in her mental health.
“When I see myself, it’s literally a rib cage,” Visage explained. “There is a nipple on top of a rib cage, and I love it. I wished I loved it at 17 and 18 and 19.”
Visage later describes the entertainment industry as a whole as “f**ked up” especially for women because there is a “standard that we cannot live up to unless it’s purchased”.
“And that’s unfair for the younger generation,” she adds.
The entire Red Table Talk conversation can be viewed here.