From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Why Buccal Fat Removal Is The Worst Beauty Trend

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

On this episode, Sean and Rachel sit down with their daughter and staff writer at the Federalist Evita Duffy Alfonso to discuss the recent celebrity trend of buccal fat removal.   Evita explains why so many influencers are flocking to cosmetic surgery, and how online algorithms play a role in setting beauty standards. Later Evita shares her belief that Tik Tok and other social media outlets are creating harmful portrayals of beauty. Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast, my partner in life and my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy.

Oh, I'm so happy to be back here at our kitchen table and joining us at the kitchen table is our daughter Evita Duffy. And Sean, I had her on Jesse Waters primetime show this week because I hosted Jesse Waters primetime. And we did this fascinating topic, which you know how these shows go, the segments like four minutes long. And this topic is so fascinating. It needed more time to breathe. Evita wrote an incredible article about this new fashion trend that's going viral on all the social media platforms, and it's called buckle fat removal. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. I know this sounds like your favorite topic. It might be right up there with the Royals. Right. Exactly. What I'm going to say, Evita has been a frequent guest on the podcast

because it's our kitchen table and she seemed to be around her kitchen table quite a bit. So she's an easy guest. Even though she's married, she comes back a bit. Also, as we've looked at ratings, she rates well. She rates. Evita rates. Evita rates. All right. the Federalists. And I thought, truthfully, it sounds like a superficial thing, right? We're talking about another beauty trend. And for some reason, though, you took it to this other level. I thought it was so interesting. Evita? Yeah. So first, let's explain what it is. So buckle fat, it sounds really bad, but it's actually not bad. It's the fat that's in your

cheeks that makes you have a full looking face. Kind of makes you look like a chipmunk maybe. Well, in some people, but in most people, it's just normal and it looks good. So if you have firmness and fullness on your cheeks, that's what people want so that as they get older, they actually lose the buccal fat and some women end up putting fillers in or do some other plastic surgery in order to get that fullness back. So why would anyone want to take away this fat pad in your cheek that you know you're going to probably want as you get older? Yeah. So buckle fat makes you look youthful, which is why it's important. And

it's especially important not to remove it at a young age because you lose, you lose it as you get older. Why are they doing it? What's the trend? What's the beauty thing? Right. So people, especially now, if you look at pictures of Bella Hadid or Leah Michelle, they, they like that they have these, or Angelina Jolie is a great example, really high cheekbones. So to, to get this high cheekbone look, they're removing the fat in their cheeks to sort of accentuate it. But the problem is, and they say, Oh, it makes your face look more angular and all these things. The problem is you're actually not, you're pronouncing the cheekbones, but you're doing it at the expense of the youthfulness and fullness of your face. So you look kind of sunken at the cheeks,

but also the other thing they get beauty wise, I think is, and I've been looking at some of these pictures. I don't think these girls look better at all, but you can see their jawline better, which is another sort of sculpted look that they're getting. So it's actually very masculine. I think actually some men have done it and I think it looks better on men

than it does on women. But the trend it's like the doctors, when they asked them done it, and I think it looks better on men than it does on women. But the trend, it's like the doctors, when they ask them about it, it's like 85% women that are getting this surgery, and it's only increasing. So there was a lot of celebrities who were doing it in the past or over the last year. Now it's become a TikTok trend. It has millions of hits on TikTok. Doctors are reporting that they're seeing twice as many people asking for the surgery than ever before. And I think one of the celebrities that has sort of accelerated that trend is Chrissy Teigen, who's, you know, because she's one of the few that's actually admitted to getting it. There's a lot who we suspect has it. Chrissy Teigen has

come out. So Chrissy Teigen is she I think she's she is like part Thai, right? I believe. Yeah. And her face is very full. It always has been. I think it's what makes her kind of different and interesting in terms of, you know, she's not like your typical, you know, standard beauty. I think she's pretty and she has these full cheeks, but obviously she maybe thinks they're too much and she took them out. So she admitted to him. I saw her picture again.

I thought she looked better before. So this is a topic I did not know about at all until I watched you guys do this segment. And it was funny. I was in the control room in the green room as you guys were doing the segment. I didn't even know what you were going to talk about because I didn't read this.

You know why you don't know? Because you don't read the Daily Mail, which is the first thing I do in the morning. It's Rachel's online Bible. So I was in the green room and it was funny, Dr. Siegel, who's on Fox all the time, he had done a segment with you a couple segments earlier than Evita. And we were talking as Evita came on, he's like, oh, that's your daughter. And what are you going to talk about? I'm like, I don't know. I don't know this buccal fat issue. And then you introduced the segment. And before Evita spoke, Dr. Siegel was like, oh my God, I wish I would have known because

this is a horrible trend. And people get it when they're young and they think they're going to look good forever. The problem is when you get old, you look that much older when you've taken all the fat out. And it's like, I wish, again, I wish I would have known and would have told her to say this. Of course, Evita was going to say that anyway. And the first thing Evita said was the aging issue. It's going to accelerate your aging. Exactly. So here's what's interesting to me, Evita,

is there have been trends, okay? And yeah, part of the problem with this one is that it's a permanent beauty trend. But it has gone viral really quick. There seems to be an acceleration of trends like this because of social media. Yeah. So social media is really has had a really interesting impact on the beauty industry for two reasons. One, things that are really unusual and unnatural go viral on social media because it does really well with the algorithm so these really crappy trends are what

show up in your feed and the other thing is that in the past a trend even a bad trend might last a few years you have like cargo pants well i said it wasn't a bad trend nothing wrong with cargo whoa whoa whoa right so bad trends might last a few years now they're lasting months maybe even weeks so to keep up you have to make decisions really fast. And when you're forced to make really big decisions, like, am I going to alter my face in a matter of weeks? You can end up making really bad decisions. And I think it's fascinating. We talk about this a lot on the podcast, the influence of social media over the youth in America. And you talk about TikTok. I mean,

I'm sure the Chinese TikTok would never allow this trend to happen in China itself, but in America, they're like, let the algorithm kick up and have these kids destroy their faces. But usually this would be a conversation that if more girls are doing it, it's a conversation that a young girl might have with their mom or maybe with their family as a whole. It's going to maybe alter the way they look. They would talk to their parents, but it seems like there's not a lot of parental advice that's being given in this situation. I don't know if a lot of teenagers are getting this done, but it's like young women in their 20s.

But even early 20s, I think would go, hey, mom, I'm looking at doing this. I mean, look, we hear a whole bunch of things that go on with Evita and what she's doing at work and where she's looking at moving. Kids share a lot with their lives, with their parents. And that might be one thing they would share, but social media is the big influencer, not the families or the parents' perspective on whether this is a good or bad idea for this procedure or surgery for their child to undertake. Yeah. It's the other mother for sure. And I think mom's right that it's not teenagers that are doing this so much as it is young women because you have to have, I mean,

a really rich teenager might be able to do it. It used to be maybe like $9,000 to $12,000. Now the price is coming down as there's been more people doing it and they want to make it more accessible, make more money off of it. So now it's around like $4,000 or $5,000. And they got to hurry up

because the trend will end quickly. So they got to lower the price, get as many people many people in yeah so it'd be like a young woman in probably her 20s who has some you know an expendable income and says you know i'm gonna i'm gonna do this for myself and they're definitely not talking to moms about it for sure i mean this is they see bella hadid doing it and all these girls on their tiktok doing it and they're like okay yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna uh make the move right now. And the ability to know what celebrities are doing. All the time. All the time.

And the fact that it used to be that celebrities wanted a mystery about themselves, but now what they trade in on is their personal life. So the more they seem like they're divulging what's most intimate and personal about them, the bigger their following is in social media. So that's also playing into it as well. Well, because they're not just making money now on the movies or the music, they're making huge money on social media. They're getting paid to divulge themselves and influence. This kind of reminds me of, and again, this is not a topic that I was aware of

before Avita wrote on it and I watched you guys' segment but it's kind of maybe this is i'm going back to my own youth that when someone gets a tattoo when they're like 22 years old that they're gonna have for the rest of their lives like oh my god why why did i get that tattoo how stupid was that are you dissing on me right now maybe a little bit i that's exactly what happened to me but it's true i got a tattoo when i was 22 when i was on the real world well you were the example and yeah other people i know some people get tattoos they might regret it just having to name the exact age that i got but yeah so yeah but it's so true um you know but i was at least clever enough to put it on my back. It is large, I will admit, but it's on my back and it's not like on my hand or my arm or my face. So let me talk about something else because I think what really got fascinating to me in your article was when you

started towards the end to get really deep because you said that another reason why this trend is accelerating and going viral is because our culture no longer has standards of beauty or objective standards of beauty. And in fact, modern society wants to actually destroy any standards of beauty. And so it's much easier to, I guess, allow, or I don't know how to explain it, but for people to go on these trends because the standard of beauty doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. So it, and I, we're, we're Catholic. So I'm going to go, we're going to go to Thomas Aquinas because the Catholics were the ones who really made aesthetics a theological field of study and talked about how there is such thing as objective beauty, that there's

a math to it. There's something called the golden ratio. What is the golden ratio? So I'm not a math person. I'm not going to be great at explaining what it is exactly. You can look it up yourselves, but it's basically a proportion standard that the Mona Lisa, the spiral on seashells, the, the, the, uh, the little veins on leaves, they all sort of abide by this sort of this, these mathematical standards. Um, Oh, I see proportional standards. And also the Parthenon is another one. But the, but the length in your, in your your arm like your shoulder to your elbow and your and your in your knuckle to the our whole bodies are made up with this standard as well i don't know if it was like 6.4 or i don't know what the number is but so that might be a little bit different than the golden ratio that's like a beauty standard but that but

you're but you're right that there is just a there's there's a science to proportions into beauty into into how how we how we look at things there's also not. So that's a more mathematical way of talking about it. There's also a biological realm too, about beauty. And they say, you know, when women, a low hip ratio is attractive and women, youthful faces, actually women and men, youthful faces are attractive. There's some sort of proportions in the face as well. Yep. And the average symmetry, I guess. Yep. So there's so there's there's a lot of of ways that we can figure out you know what is and isn't beautiful and a big you know isn't it like pornography when you see something beautiful you just know it's beautiful just like

if you see something porn you know nobody has to explain pornography if you see it you know it well so i mean yes so they what they say what and this is what Thomas Aquinas says, that's partially it. It's your senses and it's also your mind. So there's also a science to it. So there's both. And now we say, you know, beauty is whatever we think it is. Beauty is to the eye of the beholder. And part of what they say refutes Thomas Aquinas and these other theologians is, well, we, you know, everybody disagrees on what is and isn't beautiful.

is, well, we, you know, everybody disagrees on what is and isn't beautiful. And the answer to that is, you know, we, that that's people having imperfections among ourselves. Our minds are imperfect, not that objective beauty doesn't exist. It's just that it's, it's hard for us to decipher it because we're all, you know, different. We're all, we're all imperfect. Our minds are imperfect. And, and now we've, we've taken it to a whole new level so it's nothing is objective there's no objectivity to beauty they have really obese people who are definitely not beautiful and definitely not healthy with the cover of it the magazine saying this is beautiful and this is healthy um and or even telling you as you see like i mean i'm sorry like what sean who's the guy that worked in the in the Biden administration who's always

stealing luggage? Yeah. Samuel Britton. Is it Samuel? Yeah. Sam Britton. And if you've seen pictures of him dressed as a woman, it's it to me, it's it's not beautiful at all. It's the opposite of beautiful. It's somewhat repulsive. He has a mustache, but he wears lipstick. If I say that in in polite circles, I would be chastised for saying that he was not beautiful. We'll have more of this conversation after this. Breaking news coming in from Bet365, where every nail-biting overtime win, breakaway, pick six, three-point shot, underdog win, buzzer beater, shootout, walk-off, and absolutely every play in between is amazing. From football to basketball and hockey to baseball,

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Huh, maybe that apple hit me a little harder than I thought. Yeah, you should get that checked out. With standard 4x4 capability, Broncos keep going up and up. Now get up to $6,000 in rebates on eligible 2024 Bronco family models. Visit your Toronto area Ford store or Ford.ca. We've completely lost touch with reality and just said everything is subjective. If there is sort of a consensus, like if most people in the world say a beard and lipstick doesn't look good, they'll, you know, say, well, that's a social construct.

Right. And by the way, you might lose your job for it, too. And you might lose your job. And so I think to go back to buccal fat surgery, the reason why we are falling for really terrible beauty trends like this is because we've lost sight of what is beautiful. We don't know anymore. We're told everything is, everything is fake. Everything's in your mind. Everything's a construct. And we can't look with our senses and our minds to know what is and isn't beautiful. We fall for really, really bad trends. That's fascinating. And maybe this is a generational issue because for me, I look at things and I can still say, that's beautiful. That's not beautiful. And you can tell me that someone who's overweight is really beautiful or someone who I think is ugly is

beautiful. But you can tell me that, but you're not going to change my opinion. I wonder though, with how young people's minds have been messed with this garbage education that they get, if they're more susceptible to go, oh, society says this is beautiful. Oh, this must be beautiful. And they're actually buying into it. But I think an older generation who didn't have all of these crazy inputs that your generation has, I think still sees beauty in the traditional fashion. Can I just say this too? I mean, one of the things I do like about modern culture is that there are, right now, modern culture is that there are right now

it's okay that there are wider views of what is beautiful when i was growing up you only saw christy brinkley who is objectively beautiful is that yeah you don't even know who that is but you know there was christy she's like who's that i don't know okay like a blonde model or something yeah she's yeah i can't believe i'm explaining who Christy Winkley is, but, but there was Farrah Fawcett and there was Christy, not Christy T. Who was the one from, from Charlie's Angels, Sean? Cheryl Teagues. Cheryl Teagues.

Suffice to say that most of them were these very tall blonde women. And somewhere along the line, you know, the definition of beauty widened. And so now, you know, people like Jennifer Lopez and other people started entering into that realm before, you know, that wasn't so that is a good thing. But how is that? How is what I'm saying different from what you're saying? Well, that seems to be a racial issue, right? I mean, you can, anybody of any skin tone can be beautiful. I think that's- Of course. I think that's, you know, probably-

But our society was not elevating those images of beauty, not even when I was a kid. I don't remember that. Yeah, I think that would be a corporate merit. I mean, that probably would be a social issue, right? There are, I'm thinking, this is beautiful model. would be a a corporate america i mean that that probably would be a a social issue right there are i i'm thinking this is beautiful model and she's she she was in um she was in the movie done by kian peel and i'm forgetting her name but anyways but there's she's a beautiful african

model and i was i was thinking as you were saying that you you never um would see women like that in the past and now she's you know grace right the movie scenes i think that's that's wonderful this is this is different this is not about this is not racialized at all this is just about this is about you know warping uh i think what you're talking about gender right men wearing with beards and lipstick and then also just having the the the understanding that when you're looking at chrissy teigen or when you're looking at Chrissy Teigen or when you're looking at all these other celebrities, Lea Michele, their faces look sunken with the surgery. They look sad, actually.

They don't look good. So it's not just what's going to happen in the future. It's just looking at them and knowing they're looking like skeletons right now. They're not looking youthful. they're not they're looking like skeletons right now they're not looking youthful um and it has nothing to do with race and everything to do with you know what we value at for beauty which is which is generally youth and doing something to actively take that away from someone yeah that's actually a really interesting nothing to do with the other part is just accepting like who you are and what you are and i don't think i mean unless there's some

serious thing going on, any 20-year-old should be undergoing the knife, right? I mean- Well, it's just, can I go back to my eighth grade history class or sixth grade history class? Was it the Mayans who actually would flatten their noses? And then they would actually put something between baby's eyes and make them cross-eyed and that was beauty in their culture, right? They thought that this was beautiful to have a flatten flattened nose they put a board on on a person's face and flatten them and make them cross-eyed and that was beauty in their culture so maybe i mean i mean maybe beauty is culture in culture right now i was trying to say these

wanted smaller feet and so they would bind the girl's feet or whatever, right? Yeah. I don't know. So yeah. So this thing maybe, maybe in, so again, if culture defines beauty, this is our culture trying to say these different things are beautiful. And it's interesting. Again, we had different images when we were growing up. These images, again, a transgender man, a man who's become a woman is now on the cover of what Vogue and whatever female magazines you guys look at. Did I hear somewhere that a transgender man was going to be in Playboy? I mean, so they're pushing, culture is trying to push their ideology onto us and who knows, maybe they'll be successful. And these coming generations will be like, that is the most beautiful thing, a transgender man. I don't want a real woman. I want a man who's pretending to be a woman. Who knows?

The problem with this stuff is it's not about beauty so much as it is about politics. We're going to tell you that a man with boobs, but a beard who wears eye makeup, but also has armpit hair is wonderful and beautiful. And we're all kind of looking at it like that's not true. But there's a political message behind that to normalize these sort of deviant sexual tendencies that we're now trying. Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit like emperor in clothes. We're all supposed to say, yeah, that's really beautiful. You go, queen. Yeah, exactly. There's there's definitely that. I think that this trend is interesting. I love that you wrote about it because I don't think it's the last one we're going to see. We're getting it. We're going into like a little bit of, of other territory with the political stuff, but I, but I do, but I think that

yeah, let's hit, let's go back to my point with the buckle fat. My point with buckle fat surgery is just looking at it. We know it doesn't look good. We know it's going to be even worse for you in the long run. And the reason people aren't being able to figure that out is because they know in their hearts, a man with a beard doesn't look good, but everybody's telling them that it does. And so they can't trust themselves. And so when they say everybody else is doing this and it's really good, they can't use their own mind. They can't use their intellect to say, and their senses to say, Ooh, it's not a good idea. Don't do this. And they end up being really susceptible to really bad ideas. It's so surprising to me that someone like Chrissy Teigen would do this because she's

somebody who's so wealthy and you would think she would be getting better advice on what to do. But I looked at the picture. It's totally changed the way she looks and in a way that changes how uniquely beautiful she was. And I think it's really unfortunate. The Michelle, what's her name? Michelle,

Leah, Michelle, Michelle. Yeah. I saw her picture. She looked worse. Like without a doubt, she looked really sunken and hollow.

And obviously this is going to get worse for her as she gets older. Well, Vita, thank you for bringing up these trends. Sometimes we old people here don't always catch on to the trend. I did see it on the Daily Mail. You and I talked about it and you were like, should I write about this? And I'm like, yeah, you should write about this for sure because it's happening out there.

So last word? Don't mess with your face. Just stay natural. And also, you know, this is, so we talked about this being really cultural and not being able to tell the sense. This is also a multi-billion dollar beauty industry. So don't give them what they want either. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

That's absolutely right. It's those doctors that are making a lot of money and then the next trend comes along and they make more and they make more. That's right. You know, and just to wrap this up, we used to have doctors that cared about the health of people and whether it's doing this surgery that is maybe not a health issue, but it's going to be a beauty issue as these young people age. But also you look at the massive amounts of money that doctors are now making on

transition of little kids from one sex to the other. And I have to believe that they don't really care about the health of the child. They see dollar signs when they see a child come in who's disturbed, has issues, and they're going to say, well, listen, we'll transition you. Here we go. As opposed to saying, we're going to wait. We're going to go, you know what? Because we all know kids go through trends and this could be real for that child or it could be something of a phase. This is also a social media trend, Sean. I mean, absolutely.

A lot of these kids that are coming forward with those kinds of, I don't know what gender I am anymore. A lot of that has been fed by the social media trends. And yeah, you're right. A doctor is supposed to do no harm, but too many are seeing that they could get a lifelong patient by transitioning a child. And it's really sick stuff. It's sad. And we saw doctors not doing what was best for patients as well during COVID, making mistakes all over the map. So shame on some of those doctors, but the doctors I know,

that we know have been very good and outspoken on many of these issues. So listen, I appreciate Evita joining us on our podcast. Always so smart and insightful and bringing issues to the forefront that her father doesn't know anything about. Now you know everything you need to know. About buckle fat. More than you ever wanted to know about buckle fat. About buckle fat. Wow. But again, I think it's important and it's important to know what is happening in culture and especially with our youth and especially if you're a parent, it's an issue that you can talk to your kids about to go. I don't know if you're hearing this, but no, no, no, no. Oh yeah. Your kids are definitely getting trends and ideas on social media that mom and dad don't

know. As you said, it's the other mother. The other mother, the Chinese mother that you have in your kid's phone that talks to your child every single day. And that's a bad Chinese mama. On TikTok. That's right. Okay. Well, listen, thanks for joining us on our podcast. And I appreciate Evita joining us as well. I hope you all have a wonderful new year and joy and festivities.

Be safe and Merry Christmas as well. If you like our podcast, you can rate, review, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. We'd appreciate it. And thanks for joining us at the Kitchen Table. Bye, everybody. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast

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