Model Survivor: Katie Piper On Changing Perceptions of Beauty
The presenter was a rising TV personality in the U.K. when a brutal attack transformed her life. Now, she’s back in front of the camera…
Katie Piper is well-known in the U.K. as an author, television presenter, and podcaster. But today, wearing an unbuttoned white Saint Laurent shirt and high-waisted black briefs with a pair of Manolos in a London photo studio, the 36-year-old from rural Hampshire is practically incognito. Her long, tousled hair blows around her dark smoky eyes and wide cheekbones.
Between shots she stops and gazes at the monitor. “I’ve never seen myself like this,” she says, her voice choking a bit with emotion. It’s the kind of reaction one might expect from almost anyone confronted with an image of herself in a fashion magazine. At the same time it’s not hard to see why the experience would resonate with Katie so profoundly.
The daughter of a barber and a teacher, Katie grew up in southern England. After splitting with a boyfriend with whom she moved to London in her early 20s, she took a bedroom in a house share where her roommates were all aspiring actresses, dancers, singers, and models. She too started going on auditions, and found her métier in television presenting.
“I was from a small village, and it was all very exciting to be able to say, ‘I live in London and I’m on telly,’ ” Katie recalls. “It felt like I was along that path to where I wanted to be.”
Blouse and culottes, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello
Soon, though, she endured an incident that would have a seismic impact on her life.
In March 2008, Piper, then 24, was violently attacked by a 19-year-old assailant, who threw sulphuric acid in her face in the street outside her north London flat. The perpetrator, it turned out, had been recruited by a man with whom Katie had had a two-week relationship that had ended with him sexually and physically assaulting her. Katie’s injuries from the acid attack included third-degree burns on her face, neck, chest, and hands, and the loss of sight in one eye. (Both men were eventually convicted for their roles in the attack and given life sentences, but in 2018 the one who threw the acid was released after serving only nine years in prison.)
Katie was hospitalised for three months afterwards and spent 12 days in a medically induced coma. Surgeons removed the dead and damaged skin from her face and replaced it with a skin substitute, MatriDerm, to build the foundations for a graft. When it was time for her to be handed a mirror to confront her own image, she immediately handed it back, saying that it must be damaged. To date, she has undergone more than 300 operations.
After Katie: My Beautiful Face, a harrowing Channel 4 documentary about Katie’s recovery aired in 2009, she started the Katie Piper Foundation to benefit others recovering from burn injuries. In 2019, the foundation opened the U.K.’s first live-in burn and scar rehabilitation centre.
Since then, Katie has written books, including the self-help tomes Confidence: The Secret and Things Get Better; made frequent TV appearances; and launched a podcast, Extraordinary People, which features interviews with women Katie herself finds inspiring, like Great British Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain and Olympian Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill. And more recently she has become a face of Pantene’s “The Power of Hair” U.K. campaign.
It’s both refreshing and heartening that Katie’s enthusiasm for beauty appears undiminished. “I’ve always loved make-up,” she says. “I did a beauty course after leaving school, and I still enjoy face masks, exfoliations, and peels. I’ve had to learn to use primers better because of the scarring, and it’s difficult to make up one eye because of being blind in the other.”
For her on-camera and personal appearances, Katie works with the same trusted glam squad, but her once-golden hair is now a darker shade of blonde. “After the attack, the only way I could express myself was by constantly changing my hair, because I couldn’t move my face. It was a way to reinvent myself and leave the past behind, to stop people referring to the past because that girl had gone,” she says.
Understandably, she still has difficult moments, which, even as she describes them matter-of-factly, are hard to fathom. “You know why I now hate bright blonde?” she offers at one point. “Because it attracts so much attention. Out on the street men see me from the back with a good body and blonde hair, and they whistle and call, and if I turn they insult me.”
Nevertheless, Piper says her recovery forced her to reevaluate her priorities. In the years since the attack, she has transformed from someone who, she says, was “presenting on TV channels at three o’clock in the morning and thinking, ‘Wow, I’m clearing £500 (Dhs2,350) a month to pay the rent,’ ” to a woman who is on a mission to make her every action count.
Katie credits her husband, Richard Sutton, a carpenter whom she met in 2012 and married in 2015, and with whom she has two daughters, six-year-old Belle and two-year-old Penelope, with helping her to learn to trust other people again.
“I was invited to a Coldplay concert by Chris Martin, who I knew via a mutual friend, Simon Cowell. I took Richie along without mentioning who had invited me. After the show Chris invited me to talk to him in his dressing room. So there we were chatting and Gwyneth [Paltrow] wandered in, and Chris just asked if this was my boyfriend. So we both just said, ‘Er, dunno, maybe…’ Later that night, Richie said, ‘So I guess we are a couple!’ They put us together,” Piper recalls. “Soon after that I needed to have more complicated operations, and I suggested we wait a few months until we meet again. He said ‘No,’ and was by my side throughout. He saw me as myself and loved me.”
While Katie’s journey has been anything but easy, her commitment to using her experience to benefit other people is as strong as ever.
“In the early days, people always asked me, ‘What now?’ I didn’t fit in. I remember thinking, ‘Well, if I must accept that I have permanently changed, then it’s the industry I must now change.’ At times I struggle to relate to women my age, as I’ve experienced so much pain, joy, and euphoria in these short 36 years. But it’s given me an unshakable confidence, the knowledge that whatever happens in life, I have the ability to recover from it.”
Photography: Jason Belle
Hair: Christopher Long for Pantene.
Make-up: Toby Salvietto for Eyebrow Queen.
Production: Lucy Watson productions.
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s October 2020 issue