Fillers Let People Reshape Their Faces Without Surgery

The relative ease and ubiquity of injectables — especially compared to surgery — means “having work done” no longer carries the stigma it used to.

A couple of years ago, like many thirty-something women who live in big cities and spend time on the internet, Caroline, a real estate agent who lives in Los Angeles, got interested in skincare. She’d never cared about the subject before, but suddenly, it seemed to be everywhere.

She started following Rio Viera-Newton’s column on the Strategist and began stocking her bathroom cabinets with serums and essences.

Eventually, though, Caroline came to a point where progress stalled: Her face stopped looking better and better with each new product. “I plateaued,” she says now. “And I was like, I guess injectables are the next step.”

So she went to see Dr Jason Diamond, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who’s been featured on shows like Dr. 90210 and has treated everyone from Katy Perry to Chrissy Teigen. Dr Diamond injected a filler called Voluma into Caroline’s cheeks, which not only made her cheekbones look higher and more pronounced, but pulled the skin upward to minimize the appearance of laugh lines around her nose and mouth.

He also plumped up her top lip with a different filler and then injected Botox into her forehead to paralyze the muscles as a preventive measure against developing wrinkles.

“I couldn’t even tell you how much it cost,” Caroline says. “Because I basically blacked out when I saw the bill.” Still, she liked the results enough that, after Dr Diamond’s work wore off several months later, she sought out a less expensive practice in Manhattan Beach to continue getting fillers and Botox done.

Diamond is one of a handful of plastic surgeons and cosmetic dermatologists who’ve made names for themselves on Instagram for their ability to work what looks like magic with nothing more than numbing cream and syringes.

On these doctors’ social media pages, where follower counts range from the tens of thousands to the millions, you can watch them inject their patients — largely, though not exclusively, young women — with fillers meant to sharpen their jawlines, make their noses appear straighter and more symmetrical, and pump up their pouts.

Results that used to require spending tens of thousands of dollars on surgery (and risking its sometimes-grisly consequences) are now available to anyone with half an hour and a couple of thousand dollars to spare.

Author; Zan Romanoff

The relative ease of injectables — especially compared to surgery — is likely part of why “having work done” is now treated by many as a piece of lifestyle content, as shareable as a shopping trip or session in a makeup artist’s chair, and no longer as a source of shame.

Celebrities who were once hell-bent on convincing us that their beauty routines were no more complicated than drinking a lot of water and getting enough sleep have become eager to shower praise on their favourite practitioners: Kim Kardashian West posts Instagram stories about her late night-visits to Epione Beverly Hills, where she sees Dr. Simon Ourian, a cosmetic dermatologist, and Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent is a regular on Dr Diamond’s Instagram.