“Big Brother” host Julie Chen backpedaled about having plastic surgery to fix her “Asian eyes” — claiming she never tried to look less Chinese and simply wanted her eyes to be bigger.
The former CBS news anchor responded to criticism on “The Talk” on Tuesday after last week admitting she underwent the surgery because an old boss criticized her “Asian eyes.”
She now claims she’s not shunning her heritage because she still “looks Chinese”
“It was comments like, ‘Way to give in to the Western standards of beauty.’ ‘You’re denying your heritage. You’re trying to look less Asian. Guess what? I don’t look less Chinese! I’m not fooling anybody here. That’s number one,” she said.
Plenty of Chinese people have eyes that look like her post-surgery ones, she said.
“Number two: half of us Asians are born with the double-eyelid. My mother was born with it. My father has one lid that was creased, one lid that didn’t get its crease until he hit his late teens. I have one sister born with the creases, one sister born without it, so it wasn’t denying my heritage,” she said.
She then made a vague comparison about nose jobs and ethnicity.
“It’s kind of like if someone gets a nose job and gets the bump taken out, and some people say that’s an ethnic bump. Are you denying whatever your heritage is? No.”
The response comes after Chen last week revealed is a segment about secrets that she had surgery on her whole face after a former boss at a TV news station in Ohio told her at age 25 that looking Asian isn’t “relatable.”
After the surgery, her career took off, she said.
But after her confession, fans slammed her for sending the message Asian people need to “fix” the way they naturally look in order to be beautiful.