K-Pop Star Jessi on Why She Dissolved Her Lip Fillers and Why Plastic Surgery Is ‘Useless’

Years after sharing her injectable and plastic surgery procedures with the world, K-pop star Jessi is now calling them "useless" in a candid new interview with Allure.

The 34-year-old pop star has always toyed with beauty conventions over the course of her career. As Allure notes, plastic surgery is "often expected" of K-pop stars "but absolutely never, under any circumstances, spoken of publicly." Jessi broke that rule seven years ago on a talk show, clapping back at people who talked about her behind her back. "For example, they would say, 'You have fake boobs.' OK, so what if they are fake? I paid for them," she said.

She then had to defend herself against the male hosts. "It’s 2016…Who doesn’t get plastic surgery done?" she said. "I got my eyes and nose done. Everyone knows. I know people with bigger breasts than me, but they hide them and say they're natural."

"This is who I am," Jessi said at the time. "Why should I hide that?"

Looking back on that moment eight years later, Jessi hopes she kicked down some doors. "There's a lot of girls like me [in K-Pop] now," she pointed out. "Before it wasn't like that. Once I just admitted that I got my boobs done, my lips done, the whole world was like, 'Oh, my god,' but women related to me."

There's still a lot of pressure for women to look a certain way. "That's one thing that kind of sucks about this life," added Jessi. "Even when you feel like shit, you always have to look good for people or they'll say, 'Her face is [puffy]' or 'she has acne.' They'll always find something, so it's a lot of pressure."

But luckily, she's always had the support of her mother. "She always tells me, 'I wish I had the confidence to do that when I was younger. I love your confidence,'" shared Jessi. "The fact that the mom who birthed me says [that] to me feels good. She's so proud of me, and she doesn't want me to change, so if my mom doesn't judge me, nobody can."

Today, Jessi is done with the procedures. Most recently, she decided to stop getting lip fillers because they were "making my face look botched for some reason, not in real life, but on TV."

"I don't regret anything that I've done. But from now on, I just want to age gracefully and enjoy my aging process," she said, citing her mother's beauty.  "She wants to embrace time. The same for me as well. I’m just going to age the way I age. Wrinkles are inevitable unless you get hella Botox and surgery." And those options are off the table.