It’s almost like clockwork at this point. An actress gives birth, and soon enough the trolling about her changed body starts. We saw this with Aishwarya Rai, Swara Bhaskar, Richa Chadha, Bipasha Basu, Kareena Kapoor, and now Katrina Kaif joins the list.
When Kaif stepped out for the Ganpati celebrations less than a year after giving birth, the conversation wasn’t about her outing but about her changed appearance, and the trolling that came with it. The thing is, we’ve already gone through all this with Aishwarya Rai well over a decade ago, so one has to ask: did we learn nothing?
Why does the same script keep playing out? An actress who has recently had a baby, or simply gotten older, makes a public appearance, and the comments section turns into a courtroom where her looks are put on trial.
Katrina Kaif Gets Trolled
Katrina Kaif welcomed her son with husband Vicky Kaushal in November 2025, and since then, nearly every public appearance she’s made has come with a side of body commentary.
At the Ambani family’s Ganesh Chaturthi celebrations in September 2026, photos of her circulated widely, and the trolling that followed was swift and often cruel, with some users claiming she’d been “neglecting her self-care” and others going as far as suggesting her changed appearance was the result of cosmetic procedures gone wrong.
Insensitive comments like ‘She is finished’, ‘Amma dikh rahi h yeh ab’ (She looks like an aunty now), ‘Katty now fatty’, ‘Pehle jesi baat nahi rhi’ (She’s not what she used to be) and more were also posted.
One user on X (formerly Twitter) posted before-and-after images of the actor and wrote, “I wonder what happened to the Katrina we used to see before marriage and after marriage.”
Another wrote, “This is how you age when you spend years pumping your face with botox and replacing natural skin with plastic.”
Thankfully, plenty of people pushed back, which restores some faith in basic common sense. One user wrote, “She is a new postpartum mom; her body doesn’t need your judgement, it needs love. Let women heal, recover, and embrace motherhood without being body-shamed.”
Another commented, “She’s 43. She had a baby. Her body changed. That’s literally how biology works.”
Others pointed out that Kaif is far more than a celebrity: “Has a successful 400-crore business, a wonderful partner, a beautiful baby and an iconic film career. Do you have even half of that?”
That’s no exaggeration: Kay Beauty, which Kaif launched in partnership with Nykaa, grew its sales from Rs. 240 crore in FY25 to Rs. 350 crore in FY26, a 46% jump. The brand is also being sold internationally now.
This shows Kaif’s prowess as a business owner, and yet all anyone can talk about is that she does not have the exact same body type as she had in her twenties.
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The thing is, Kaif is not the first or only actress to receive such treatment. Kareena Kapoor has been through this cycle twice: first after the birth of her son Taimur in 2016, and again after her second son, Jeh, in 2021.
The second time, she walked the ramp at Lakmé Fashion Week just seven months postpartum and, as she later recalled in interviews, was brutally trolled for her weight.
And no conversation about this is complete without Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and the brutal trolling she still receives to date for her changed appearance over the years. She was body-shamed after giving birth to her daughter Aaradhya in 2011, and trolled again at Cannes in 2012 for the same reason.
Since then, she has been trolled at most public appearances, with comments like “fat aunty” being used liberally. It is as if the public is just flummoxed as to why a woman in her 50s does not look the exact same as she did when she was 20.
From side-by-side edits with her younger self to memes, it’s all aimed at mocking her for very natural body changes that happen to basically every single person alive on this earth.
Then you’ve also got the double standard, where people often bring up other Bollywood moms, namely, Malaika Arora, Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt, holding them up as inspiration for ‘bouncing back’ after pregnancy.
However, what many people lose sight of in these comparisons is that pregnancy doesn’t affect every woman identically, and recovery can look very different for individuals depending on their medical, physical and emotional needs.
Deepika herself has spoken about how pregnancy leaves its mark, changing a person inside and out.
In a 2025 interview with Marie Claire, she said: “I went through a lot in the eight, nine months of being pregnant.”
She also spoke about how her final trimester was very uncomfortable and added, “Suddenly you’re discovering body parts because they hurt. But that rib pain was, oh my God.”
Kareena and Aishwarya have also been trolled for looking ‘old’ and not as young as they used to, which is absurd in its own right, considering every single person ages and physically looks much different at the age of, say, 55 as compared to how they looked at 18 or 25.
What people need to realise is that pregnancy or ageing is not a winter coat that one can just remove and put back into storage once summer comes around.
Among all this, one has to give props to Katrina, Kareena and Aishwarya and all the others who have refused to bend to the pressures of society, gone about their lives, continuing to show up in public instead of hiding away at home. None of them has publicly chased a crash transformation to appease the critics.
Instead, they are still stepping out for public appearances, at functions and events, even ad shoots and filming as per normal, in the bodies they have now. That is something very encouraging, and hopefully a positive message to Indian women everywhere that things like pregnancy or ageing don’t have to be something shameful or to be kept away from the public eye.
And then there’s the other double standard: male stars are fawned over and crowned ‘silver foxes’ as they age, while female stars aren’t allowed to change at all.
Bodies change and people age. The sooner we stop treating that as news, the better.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: India Today, Moneycontrol, The Indian Express
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Katrina Kaif, Katrina Kaif baby, Katrina Kaif weight, Katrina Kaif trolling, Katrina Kaif postpartum, Katrina Kaif postpartum weight, beauty standards, indian beauty standards, Kareena Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai
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