When Michael Jackson Told His Mother “I Am So Ugly” Before Getting His Nose Job Done

Katherine Jackson recalled her superstar son Michael Jackson’s insecurity about his physical appearance. In a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey , a year after he died, the Jackson matriarch recalled how the “King of Pop,” who ruled the hearts of Americans with his music and dance, was unsatisfied with his looks and would tell his mother that he was “so ugly.”

In an emotional sit-down in 2010, the now-94-year-old mother told Winfrey, “He’d say ‘I’m just so ugly, I don’t want to go out there,'” referring to his addiction to plastic surgeries. “I’d say ‘You’re not.’ To a mother, all her children are always beautiful,” as per Daily Mail. However, according to the matriarch, his hatred towards his features prompted him to get the nose job done.

“One day he just got up and decided ‘I’m going to get my nose done. It’s too big,'” recalled Katherine. “One day he just made up his mind and he just left. When I enquired about where he was, he had gone down to get his nose done. He thought I might try to talk him out of it I think. He was so unhappy. He thought he was so ugly.”

Known as the “man of many faces,” Jackson had undergone multiple surgeries in his lifetimes to look a certain way. Although he began by making minor tweaks, gradually it became an unhealthy obsession for him leading to an unrecognizable transformation. Before his death, he had a completely altered look but he admitted to only two nose jobs and blamed the white skin color on vitiligo.

However, a plastic surgeon, Dr. Wallace Goodstein, who worked beside the singer’s surgeon in the 1990s, weighed in on Jackson’s facial reconstruction over the years, “He had multiple surgeries. He came in approximately every two months. It was about 10 to 12 surgeries in two years, while I was there,” specifically, “multiple nose jobs, cheek implants and he had a cleft put in his chin. He had eyelid surgery … You name it he had it,” claiming he had many “inappropriate” operations done, per PEOPLE.

Of course, he wanted to hide his surgeries from the public eye so he got them done in the evenings when no one was there, “They were done in the evening when personnel had to come in so no one else in the office could see him going in or out. His nose became so small because he was operated on repeatedly. He has barely anything left for a nose,” the source said.

Meanwhile, his mother Katherine revealed some details and withheld others saying, “He had more than two, he was just embarrassed. It was like a toothpick at one time. I thought it was too small. I hear that people get addicted to plastic surgery and I think that’s what happened to him. I had told him ‘That’s enough. Why do you keep going?'” She even warned the surgeon to not operate if Jackson came again for the procedures.

The Thriller singer died of cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009, and his mother remembered it as “the worst day of my life.”