Olympian McKayla Maroney gets real about whether or not she got lip injections

Four years ago, McKayla Maroney became instantly recognizable to millions of people all across the world. An accomplished gymnast, McKayla won a team gold medal as well as an individual silver medal in the vault competition during the 2012 Summer Olympics. She was one-fifth of the women’s gymnastics team dubbed the “Fierce Five,” which also included history-making gymnast (and one of our personal heroes) Gabby Douglas.

Despite all of those incredible accomplishments, McKayla became an international icon thanks to making a funny face during a candid photo that inadvertently went viral, becoming one of the most popular memes of all time. Like any public figure, she’s unfortunately been besought with unpleasant rumors since then.

Now, McKayla is shutting the haters down.

McKayla, who announced that she would not be competing in gymnastics any longer back in February 2016, chatted with Seventeen.com about her life post-2012 Olympics and post-memehood, and about the recent rumors that she’d gotten lip injections.

The medal-winning Olympian, who is still friendly with her former teammates (and even texted the two, Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman, who made it onto the Olympic team to congratulate them), appeared in a video released earlier in July during the Olympic Trials, in support of USA Gymnastics. Her appearance in the video, in which she’s wearing a shiny lip color along with other make-up, set off the rumors that she had gotten lip injections or otherwise surgically altered her lips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=

McKayla shut down those rumors pretty quickly, straightforwardly saying that she hadn’t gotten any lip injections. She went on to explain that (obviously) a person’s face changes as they age and she had gotten into using make-up more recently. “Your face changes, you get older, your face fills out, and you fall into liking makeup and different stuff like that.”

McKayla cited her friend Alexa Losey, a beauty guru and YouTuber, and Halsey, one of her favorite singers, as two influences who got her into makeup. “Makeup and a camera can really make you look like a different person.”

Understandably, McKayla was a bit offended by the hordes of people online critiquing her appearance and making judgments: “It would kind of hurt my feelings when you haven’t done anything.”

The famous “not impressed” meme of McKayla features her pulling her mouth in a kind of grimace, so obviously her lips look thinner than usual. It’s also important to remember that she was 16 years old back then. She’s 20 now, and like McKayla said, people change — physically and in terms of style. On top of all that, it’s honestly nobody’s business but McKayla’s what she does to her face. She’s a grown woman. This isn’t a botched-surgery situation by any means — McKayla looks great, and so do her lips.

On the bright side, the former Olympian isn’t letting the rumors get to her, proving that she knows better than anyone how to take a joke with a recent Instagram post addressing the rumors.

“me thinking about how to get my face to look like i’ve never done anything to my face when i’ve never done anything to my face,” McKayla writes.