The Secrets of

28.09.2026, 13:45 allure.com

When The Swan first aired two decades ago, in 2004, the reality makeover show captivated viewers—and horrified critics. Ahead of a new Hulu documentary about the controversial series, we revisit a story longtime Allure contributor, Joan Kron, wrote for our September 2004 issue. In the piece, Kron reports on what happened offscreen throughout season one—and the details the contestant didn’t reveal.

On the day of the Swan pageant finale, close to a thousand guests—mostly families and friends of the contestants and the producers—pass through metal detectors, pick up their entry badges, reluctantly give up their cameras, and find their seats in the VIP section of the soundstage (adjoining the American Idol set). Under a fake deep blue sky sparkling with lights, fans wave homemade signs: “Las Vegas is Betting on Belinda.” “We Love Rachel.” “Chica bam Cristina, We Love You.”

It takes a village to make a woman beautiful,” says Swan creator and executive products Nely Galán in her welcoming remarks to the crowd. And the villages are all th ere—the two plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentist, psychotherapist, exercise guru, dermatologist, Lasik eye specialist, choreographer, pageant coach, and hair-extension technicians. Backstage, ten makeup artists, ten hairstylists, and nine dressers fuss over the Swans, the nine final contestants of this surgical interpretation of Cinderella.

In the pageant, each woman is introduced with her “before” video and a heartrending confession. Beth Lay is first, a gangly Plain Jane with drab hair, a gummy smile, and wire-rim glasses. Her painful confession is that her husband kissed another woman. But Lay doesn't have the nerve to leave him, fearing that “no man will ever love me again.” A silhouette of a curvy woman appears on a scrim, which rises to reveal the new, improved Lay, now a blonde knockout in a strapless black gown slit up to the legal limit. Wolf whistles and cheers follow. She looks fully capable of turning consonants on Wheel of Fortune.

The Swan Contestant Beth Lay sees herself for the first time after her transformation during episode 3 of the first season.

Lay’s parents and husband, carrying their four-year-old son, mount the steps to the stage. It is the first time they’ve seen each other in person in four months. This is one of those lump-in-the-throat moments that make reality TV worth watching. Lay sweeps the little boy into her arms; the audience dabs at tears. Then an anxious murmur goes through the crowd. Uh-oh. The child twists away from her, trying to get out of her arms. It seems that he does not recognize his mother. Quickly, the house lights come up, and Lay and family are hustled backstage to get reacquainted. After a 45-minute pause in the taping, Lay’s “before and after” scene is reshot from the top—minus the family moment—and there are no reunion scenes for any other contestant that day or in the pageant that airs three days later on national TV. A retired psychiatric nurse in the audience whispers, “I wonder if there’ll be any divorces next week.”

The Swan, of course, is Fox TV’s reality series that critics and viewers love to berate but can’t stop watching. The Swan is Extreme Makeover meets The Apprentice, with a touch of Survivor thrown in. By Nielsen standards, the show is a big hit, and in October, a second season launches with a fresh gaggle of Swannabes. The Swan is also being exported to a dozen other countries, starting with Germany, and will be seen around the world. And next month, Regan Books, publisher of the best-selling Zone Diet series, will publish The Swan Curriculum, an inspirational self-improvement guide with makeover edicts on practically everything except how to perform one’s own surgery.

Galán, the former head of entertainment at Telemundo, believes that “beauty is power” and sees competition as incentive. “What would motivate me to get in shape?” she asked herself when planning the show. “If I was in a movie naked, or in a beauty pageant.” Galán also confides that she has had Botox, collagen, Restylane, and tooth veneers herself—“and I want a boob job, but I have to find the time. If something bothers you, you have it fixed,” she says. “I’m not ashamed. I don’t make a secret of anything.”

But despite its success, The Swan puts a lot of noses out of joint, and not just those of the contestants. USA Today called it a “plastic surgery horror show.” Rosie O’Donnell denounced it, saying it sets women back 30 years. Plastic-surgery associations said it creates “un-realistic expectations.” And The Boston Globe lambasted the women’s “rubbery lips eerily cast from the same mold” and “teeth from the same box of Chiclets,” while comparing the pageant contestants to “a fleet of flaming drag queens...in trashy lingerie struts.” And those were the good reviews.

Dr. Terry Dubrow in a consultation with one of The Swan contestants in 2004.

Critics seemed to fall into two camps: vanity bashers, who dislike the pumped-up breasts and the objectification of women competing in bikinis; and taste snobs, who object to the hairstyles, makeup, and clothes. But what may really irritate people about The Swan is the belief that surgically altered women are “beauty thieves,” says sociologist Jacque Lynn Foltyn about women who assume the status that has been the alleged birthright of those born beautiful. They are seen as frauds, as dishonest, compared to the genetically gifted “aristocrats of beauty,” Foltyn says. (The word pretty, she explains, comes from the Old English word for “trick” or “being tricked.”) Beauty not only turns heads and opens doors; those blessed with it tend to marry well and can earn more. And as much as Americans admire self-made people, in the hierarchy of beauty, natural trumps artificial every time.

The hostility of the public toward manufactured good looks, says Foltyn, “shows how ambivalent we are with surface manipulation, especially when it is brazenly displayed rather than hidden away and denied. We’re rooting for the contestants, and at the same time, we’re snickering and resenting them.”

Viewers of plastic-surgery makeover shows, while transfixed, also seem to have little sympathy for the suffering of beauty seekers who go under the knife, unless they are correcting a birth defect. It is a curious phenomenon of cosmetic surgery that most people view others’ complaints about sagging cheeks or breasts as vain, while they see their own physical dissatisfactions as valid. The Swan provides a cosmetic-surgery candy store to the contestants, who can choose the procedures they want and refuse those suggested by the show’s two plastic surgeons, Randal Haworth and Terry Dubrow. Kelly Alemi, a 28-year-old graduate student from Baltimore, rejected Haworth’s recommended nose job and cheek implants, because she and Dubrow didn’t think she needed them. Still, her surgery took eight hours, says Dubrow—and included a brow lift, cheek-fat removal, lip enlargement with abdominal fat (“not butt fat,” she says), saline breast implants, and liposuction under her chin and from her waist to her ankles. Her recovery was excruciating. “I couldn’t walk for two days, and I couldn’t turn over in bed for three weeks,” she says. “But all my life I wanted other people’s features—Angelina Jolie’s lips, Jennifer Aniston’s hair, Demi Moore’s body, and big boobs.” And now that she has acquired reasonable facsimiles, “people want my features,” she says proudly.

Dr. Ronald Haworth with a contestant post surgery during the first season.

Alemi isn’t the only Swan who refused certain procedures. Haworth admits that some of the women cancelled their lip lifts when they saw the swelling it caused in those who had the operation first. Neither this nor the yeast infections some of the women suffered are mentioned on air. Besides their handlers, a round-the-clock nurse, a psychotherapist, and Galán, the Swans had only one another to talk to and confide in. All their surgeries took place within a period of four to five weeks, and the women recovered as a group in mirror-and phone-free apartments in a condominium complex in Marina del Rey with a view of the Hollywood sign.

Nine hours after the finale taping started, under a blizzard of confetti, Galán crowned Rachel Love-Fraser, a 27-year-old construction-company clerk, “The Ultimate Swan.” For the losers, being sprung from “plastic-surgery prison,” as some of them called it, was enough of a consolation prize. “I was running in the halls of the studio screaming, ‘We’re free, we’re free,’” Alemi says. “‘Oh, my God, we can make phone calls and be normal.’” Then the women headed home to life without publicists, bodyguards, drivers, therapists, and one another.

Ten days later, a newly confident Alemi stands at the front door of her Baltimore condominium, 45 pounds lighter, with her 34D “Hollywood boobs” (as she calls them), her sprayed-on tan, and her long blonde extensions. On her cropped, scoop-neck T-shirt, “bebe” is spelled out in rhinestones; a sliver of taut midriff peeks out above the waistband of her pants. A “Welcome Home Kelly” sign hangs from the living-room ceiling, left over from the party Alemi and her boyfriend, Bob Moxley, threw to watch the pageant on their plasma TV. Stacked on an end table in the living room are multiple copies of People, US Weekly, and TV Guide, all with features about the pageant. “US compared me to Pamela Anderson. And Simon Cowell said something nice about my makeover. I got more press than anyone,” Alemi says, seemingly immune to the criticism of the show in almost every story.

A scene from the operating room during season one of The Swan.

“You were never that ugly,” says Alemi’s oldest friend, BettyAnn Kehl, criticizing the show’s rendition of Alemi. “They made me out to be the ugliest girl on the East Coast,” adds Alemi, who flip-flops between sympathy and disdain for her former self. She was a flight attendant with USAir for five years, then became a licensed makeup artist for Prescri