The past decade has witnessed the dramatic rise of social media. This, in turn, has contributed to a new phenomenon in aesthetic medicine and plastic surgery, in which medical professionals use platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat for commercial purposes. This type of publicity has exposed a greater number of potential customers to different aesthetic techniques, allowing people to easily find, observe and compare procedures that aim to correct perceived body or facial imperfections. However, this trend of visible ‘before and after’ images raises a number of questions around its effect on public perceptions of beauty, youth and graceful ageing.
A younger clientele
Previously, plastic and aesthetic surgery procedures were largely associated with the ageing face and a patient population over the age of 40 years. However, social media has encouraged what has been dubbed the ‘Kardashian effect’, where more people between the ages of 18 and 30 years have become avid and regular consumers of different aesthetic procedures aiming to enhance beauty.
Where plastic surgery interventions that are not medically necessary reconstructions were once generally considered to be taboo or a matter of discretion, many younger consumers now see conspicuous consumption of aesthetic medicine as a mark of social status. These clients are increasingly happy to take selfies in the clinic and broadcast live videos of their procedures, which may be translated into supportive engagements from other users and boost their social media popularity (Mills et al, 2018; Tiggemann et al, 2018).
Capturing an audience
The changing demographics of potential clients has created an incentive for aesthetic practitioners from different training backgrounds to promote their services in ways that reach and engage an increasingly younger target audience. Many users of various social media platforms are following accounts that post daily videos of procedures from baby botox to lip-filler application and thread lifting. The rise of social media influencers as a new form of celebrity has created a lucrative niche for injectors and plastic surgeons, whose popularity can increase, almost overnight, based on single client with a sufficient number of followers (Hogue and Mills, 2019).
An informal study
To investigate this phenomenon, the authors examined around 30 Instagram accounts of aesthetic practitioners, including plastic surgeons, nurses, GPs, dermatologists and dentists, who offered botulinum toxin, facial fillers, thread lifting and buttock lift/enlargement. Each of these accounts had anywhere from 10 000 to over 100 000 followers, while the accounts of customers people who had shared their post-procedure photos had up to 6 million followers. It was evident that around 9 in 10 consumers of these procedures displayed on these accounts were women in their 20s and 30s. Most of these women had lips, noses and jawlines of remarkably uniform shape and sharpness.
Uniformity or diversity
This uniformity of appearance stands in marked contrast to beauty icons of past decades. The culture around aesthetic medicine risks creating a beauty standard where the diverse and distinctive features of celebriies, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Hutton, Vanessa Paradis, Sophia Loren, Twiggy, Marilyn Monroe and Grace Jones would be cast as imperfections to be ironed out. Not only does this contribute to a dull and artificial cultural conception of beauty, but it risks encouraging higher rates of body dysmorphia and consequent social anxiety in younger generations. To avoid this, aesthetic practitioners should aim to challenge simplistic and uniform ideas of youth, symmetry and perfection, and instead celebrate the unique elegance that individuality, asymmetry and age can bring to the human face.