For all the talk about buccal fat removal and “Ozempic face,” NY Mag’s The Cut published an interesting article about plastic surgery trends and the effects of fillers and their subsequent dissolution. The initial trend was to look more full-faced and youthful, “pillowy,” if you will. They used Kylie Jenner as their example for that. And the new trend is to look “snatched” like Bella Hadid, which includes (of course) buccal fat removal. So that involves first dissolving fillers and by the way people also dissolve fillers because they migrate and start to look crazy and the stories/videos included in the article are terrifying.
Since roughly 2016, millions of people have gone to dermatologists to put things in their faces with one particular goal: to look like sexy babies. The way they achieved this was with filler — generally acid and fat injections. This era of filler created a specific aesthetic marked by heart-shaped faces, teeny-tiny noses, and full, puffy lips and cheeks.
Quite recently, faces have begun to go the opposite way.
“I can’t remember the last time somebody asked me for big, juicy, plump lips,” says Dhaval Bhanusali, the doctor behind Martha Stewart’s ageless skin.
If you know famous faces, the transition can be defined as this: “Everyone wanted to look like Kylie Jenner. Now they want to look like Bella Hadid,” says Matthew James, a British makeup artist and beauty influencer who used fillers for ten years to look “a bit pillowy.”
One reason for the shift? It turns out fillers weren’t the elixir of youth people wanted them to be. Over time, many a filler enthusiast found the substance was actually migrating around the face.
“It was marketed as this riskless thing,” says Carly Raye, a Toronto-based content creator who got lip fillers at 20. She had a common experience: Her filler traveled, creating a ring of puffiness around her lips that various surgeons have described as the “Juvéderm mustache,” “duck lips,” or “Homer Simpson face.”
Filler could pile up anywhere. “I would smile and I had little bulges on the tops of my cheeks,” says Rosie Genute, a Jersey-based makeup artist, of her wandering under-eye filler.
Raye and Genute, like many other patients, were led to believe that minimal risks were involved and that though migration was possible, it was unlikely. What’s more, patients were often told filler would disappear quickly. That isn’t always the case. “We say that filler only lasts a year, but that’s completely false. It most often lasts a lot longer,” says Sagar Patel, a Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon.
Why all this new information about fillers now? It seems that everyone — from providers to patients — simply didn’t know that much about the stuff to begin with. And maybe they still don’t.
So I wasn’t really planning on fillers and don’t need lip injections, but this article truly terrified me. Like, you get fillers to look a certain way, but then they migrate and you end up looking another way. And yes, it’s reversible with the dissolving, like Amy Schumer and Simon Cowell talked about. But the patients in the article say that dissolving can be painful, like acid in your face, which makes sense considering the word — dissolving! And even after dissolving things might not look great. The anecdote about young woman shifting around her loose facial skin post-dissolution in the full article may haunt my dreams. The fact that there are facial trends that require this much effort, maintenance, and potential complications is a lot. Like one of the sources in the article says, it’s this pursuit of ultra-perfection that makes people think everything is fixable/changeable. And it seems exhausting! I’m exhausted enough by my skincare routine, I couldn’t imagine doing all this. Haircuts and makeup are things that should go in and out of fashion, not faces!
Photos credit: Cover Images/Instar and via Instagram
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