“I’m at peace with not being perfect and I wasn’t like that before,” says Kardashian, pausing to look down. “I hate my hands — they’re wrinkly and gross. But I’ve lived life and I’ve changed so many diapers with these hands and I’ve snuggled my babies with these hands, so I’m okay with them. [Getting older] doesn’t mean that I won’t strive for perfection, but you get to a point where you’re like, ‘Okay, my health is more important than anything else.’”

Sure, okay, but… “You didn’t come out with a vitamin line,” I note. “You came out with a skin-care line.”

“It’s hard to explain because I am at peace, but I would still do anything to look and feel youthful.”

This I believe. Because just before we met she told the New York Times that she would consider eating poop if it meant eternal youthfulness. “I was kind of joking, but now that I think about it, I would probably eat shit if someone told me, ‘If you eat this bowl of poop every single day, you’ll look younger.’ ”

“A whole bowl?”

“Maybe just a bite. I don’t think I can do a whole bowl.”

“I don’t think your body could accept a whole bowl.”

We nod in agreement. Just a couple of cosmetic gastroenterologists hanging out on a couch, talking shop.

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t know the difference from that to an unhealthy level of feeling like I can’t age,” she says. “I’m 41. I always want to look appropriate. There does come a point when you’ve taken it too far — overfilled, too tight, too much cosmetic work. There’s nothing worse.”

Proximity to a celebrity usually carries tacit permission to stare. But this is a whole new level. In some way, it feels like my job is to authenticate her as if she is a rare Victorian postage stamp. In the Kardashian-media ecosystem in which we all live, with every scroll, view, like, and follow, we have built the pedestal on which she now sits. So we demand the right to admire our work.

If you look back 10, 15 years, you can almost see a bright generational divide delineating the moment that Kim Kardashian’s body became the Platonic ideal of a body. But unlike the Aphrodites of generations past, Kardashian wasn’t born with it, she created it. What we admire in her isn’t the idea that she was born with it; we are admiring an act of creation. The vehicle for her message has been her own flesh and blood. Her body is her canvas. Instagram, Hulu, TikTok, and, yes, a beauty magazine — these are the museums, and she is the exhibition. Admittance is free, except, of course, when it comes at the price of a little self-loathing. The cost of feeling just a bit worse about yourself because after you see a Kim Kardashian exhibit, it’s hard not to feel extremely… human. The dagger nails, the daddy longlegs lashes, the tiny waists, the bulbous butts: Can we trace it all back to Kim? And is body hyperbole ever actually body positive?

I ask her if she feels responsible, even guilty, for setting an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard.

“If I’m doing it, it’s attainable. There are so many different beauty standards — whether it’s Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Lopez, Marilyn Monroe. When I was a teenager, [the look] was just blonde waifs.” Then she saw Salma Hayek, who was so beautiful and had darker hair and darker skin and more curves. She looked more like Kardashian. “My mentality was never like, you see them on TV or in magazines and pick who you want to be,” she says. “It was always: Be yourself, find beauty in everything.”

A lovely sentiment, but it’s hard to reconcile it with the other Kim Kardashian — the one who lost a reported 16 pounds in three weeks to shimmy into Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy birthday, Mr. President” dress for the Met Gala.

“It was a roller coaster of emotions,” she says. “To even find the dress was a feat, and then to get them to allow me to wear the dress was another feat. You have [to wear] gloves and there are guards and you had to put down special paper. I think [the dresser] was shaking because if anything rips, if anything goes wrong, you know? This is Marilyn’s dress. And it absolutely did not fit.

“Two weeks before [the Met Gala], I was 10 pounds down and I was so proud of myself,” she says. “Then I got down 15 [pounds] and it fit. I couldn’t believe it.”

Kardashian, who eats a plant-based diet and was recently named the chief taste consultant for Beyond Meat, ate real meat again for her pre-Gala diet. Then “psoriasis broke out over my body and I got psoriatic arthritis so I couldn’t really move my hands,” she says. “It was really painful, and I had to go to a rheumatologist who put me on a steroid. I was freaking out. I cut out the meat again, and it’s calmed down.”

In response to the backlash to her extreme weight loss, she says, “If I was starving and doing it really unhealthy, I would say that, of course, that’s not a good message. But I had a nutritionist, I had a trainer. I have never drunk more water in my life. I don’t see the criticism for other people when they lost weight for roles — they are [considered] geniuses for their craft.” She pauses. “There are so many things out there that are so not accurate and not true.”

I point out that I think it can be hard for people to have compassion for her.

“I think I’ve always just been the underdog.”

Kardashian is worth an estimated gazillion dollars. From now until the day she dies, she will never know what it feels like to hold a bus ticket, stress about rent, stand in line, or wish for something and wait longer than a hummingbird’s heartbeat before it is presented to her, wrapped in a grosgrain ribbon. This is what I’m thinking when I say, “How have you been the underdog?”

“Being on a reality show and that’s not respected,” she explains. “Feeling like I need to work harder to show you guys that I’m not the person you think. I saw some stupid report today where it was like, ‘Kim’s rejected to come to the Jubilee by the Queen.’ I was in London with my boyfriend who’s filming a movie and we’re only here two days. But [the headline] is, ‘Kim: Rejected!’ I think that’s also why I love doing the reality show — the chance to show people who I really am.”

I venture again to ask Kim Kardashian: Consultant what she would do to my face. Now she sits up straighter and leans into me. Clearly, we have stepped into her comfort zone.

“Are you a filler girl?” she asks. “A Botox girl?”

“I’m a deodorant and toothpaste girl.”

She returns to Botox: “You really don’t need a lot. You look amazing, you really do.”

And it occurs to me, the dynamics of our conversation have flipped. I’m the subject, she’s the scrutinizer. It’s unnerving being analyzed like that. Then, unexpectedly: I feel bad for her. She never came out and said, “Please stop staring at my nasolabial fold,” but on some level, I wonder if she thought it. And I wonder what’s worse: all that relentless, entitled staring or the day it stops.

“What happens when it all goes away?”

“It would be amazing to retire being Kim K and just be a lawyer. But if it all went away, I would be just as happy.” She pauses. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I could swear there’s a wistfulness to her voice, almost like nostalgia as she imagines life when all this is gone. “I would want people to walk away and be like, ‘She was a good person, and she did some good things.’”