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Cosmetic surgery is not over, far from it. But the trend is towards discretion and naturalness, with a simple objective: no one should think that we have gone under the knife. The stars have made this change of direction for several years. They are now followed by influencers, who do not hesitate to document their approach on social networks.
Nabilla who underwent a breast reduction, Cardi B who had her buttock implants removed. Courtney Cox, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz and many others who stopped facial injections to remove the ultra-smoothed effect… Even the Kardashian clan would have backtracked: Kim and Khloe would have removed their buttock implants (even if they did not never admitted this operation publicly), Kylie Jenner would have reduced the volume of her lips.
Return to natural
Lip fillers, Brazilian butt lift (the famous BBL for Brazilian Butt Lift), breast implants… All these aesthetic operations would have gone out of fashion. No more ultra-full lips, plump cheekbones, XXL buttocks and chests. Gone is the famous so-called hourglass shape which has been essential for years on social networks. Fashion is now natural.
As a result, on TikTok, there is a parade of young women who go to their surgeons to request inversions. Basically, it involves removing implants and fillers to restore its previous appearance.
Outdated operations
Fran, a 24-year-old flight attendant approached by Refinery29, who spent more than 5,000 pounds in 2018 to get the “Instagram Face”, found herself overwhelmed by the “return to naturalness” of influencers. “I resorted to Botoxdermal filler, microblading, microneedling and facial contouring“, she explains. But when she noticed that this aesthetic had gone out of fashion, she regretted her operations. “I felt like a bit of a clown when people started going natural, wearing tinted concealer and getting soap brows, while mine were tattooed. I will always look like a Bratz doll“.
In 2023, the trend is a return to the skinny shape of the 2000s. As a result, people who have gone under the knife want to have their implants or fillers removed. On TikTok, hashtags related to lip reductions total millions of views, #lipdissolving has nearly 87 million, #lipfilterdissolved more than 44 million. That of #breastreduction, used to evoke breast reduction, has 1.5 billion views. In the United States, cosmetic surgeons are also seeing an increase in requests for breast reductions. This operation increased by 54% between 2019 and 2022, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
A return to nature but not the end of interventions
Certain very specific operations have become obsolete. The “fox eyes” for example. This operation, also called “cat eyes”, consists of raising the eyebrows and eyelids to obtain almond-shaped eyes. “‘Fox eyes’ were a very popular trend in 2021, but thankfully seem to be going out of fashion“, says Dr. Hawkes. According to her, this hype was probably due to filters and apps that change the shape and size of the eyes. “But it’s a very unnatural look, based on a social media trend, and overall it’s awful“.
But can we really talk about a return to nature? Because the current fashion for aesthetic removals does not rhyme with the end of interventions. And it is clear that a multitude of new beauty trends are flourishing on social networks. But now we add more, we take away. Particularly on the face. Just look at the craze around “chin lipo”, a sort of liposuction of the chin, or “bichectomy”, which consists of removing or reducing oral fat.