This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There's a daytime talk show that airs on CBS called The Talk. It's kind of like the view,

if you've ever seen that. Five female hosts sitting around a table discussing current events,

and when it returned for its fourth season premiere in 2013, they came up with this stunt

called Secrets Week. Over the course of the week, each of the five co-hosts took turns revealing

one of their deepest, darkest, juiciest secrets. Because who doesn't love a good secret?

That's our newest producer, Vivian Lee. For example, we learned that week that Sharon Osborne

had a fling with Jay Leno. That's a state secret. But more interesting was a secret from one

of the other co-hosts, Julie Chen. My secret dates back to when I was 25 years old,

and I was working as a local news reporter in Dayton, Ohio. Now, I want to see. The way Chen tells

it, she'd been paying her dues as a reporter, but what she really dreamed about was becoming an anchor.

It's cold out in the field. I wanted to try and get a seat on the anchor desk.

But when she approached your news director about the possibility, he gave her some feedback.

And he said, because of your heritage, because of your Asian eyes, sometimes I've noticed when

you're on camera and you're interviewing someone, you look disinterested. You look bored. Because your

eyes are so heavy, they're so small. I hate people. Yeah. But Chen, who's Chinese American,

found herself wondering if maybe he had a point and reached out to a prominent talent agent for

some career advice. And he actually took it a step further. He said, I cannot represent you,

unless you get plastic surgery to make your eyes look bigger.

And then Chen admits to the audience that she did it. She got the surgery, a procedure called

blepharoplasty. For people who are not of East or Southeast Asian descent, blepharoplasty is

usually done to lift looser sagging skin around the upper eyelids caused by aging. Just Google

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