Ferren Dickey MSA

The normalization and commercialization of cosmetic surgery in American culture and on social media is having adverse effects on women. Influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok contribute to the obsession with perfection and promote the idea that regular women need to spend money to be beautiful. The popularity of cosmetic surgery has increased, with procedures becoming more accessible and marketed to a wider audience. Social media influencers use their wealth to get procedures and promote them as normal, leading to a rise in cosmetic surgery content on platforms like TikTok. The commercialization of cosmetic surgery is also influenced by algorithm-based ads and mainstream media, which present aging as something to be corrected. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner have been open about their cosmetic procedures, setting an example of honesty and moderation. More honesty from social media and Hollywood figures could help alleviate women's insecurities caused by comparison culture. My name is Farron Dickey, and today I'm going to be talking about cosmetic surgery and its effects on American women. In February of this year, I was scrolling through my TikTok feed, unbeknownst that I would see a video I would think about weekly from that time on. I've been following lifestyle fashion influencer Kennedy Yurik for over a year and was accustomed to seeing her videos, often looking at her for cute fashion inspiration along with generally relatable content. It took me by surprise when I saw her video explaining the fact that she had gotten liposuction, a weight loss surgery, despite her only being 130 pounds. Besides her obviously looking great, this moment has stuck in my mind since, encompassing the newfound normalization of cosmetic surgery in our culture and on social media. I've looked at an array of sources, sliding between those written by feminist journalists and to those offering perspective from the surgeon themselves, to find the impacts of this cultural shift. In my research, I found that today's normalization and commercialization of cosmetic surgery is having adverse effects on American women. I believe as a culture, we need to deconstruct this through proper education and put responsibility on providers to ensure that cosmetic patients are making the right decisions for their future and current selves when undergoing cosmetic surgeries. Cosmetic surgery has been around for decades, but that doesn't mean it's always looked the same. Advancing technology has set today's procedures miles past those performed in the 1960s, with biomedical enhancements making even obtaining procedures 100 times easier. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported a 20% increase in cosmetic procedures between 2019 and 2022, specifically in areas like fat fillers and other minimally invasive operations. I mean, you can pretty much walk into any medical spa around the country and get two syringes of Botox or a set of new lips in 45 minutes. On face value, this might look amazing. The opportunity for women anywhere to finally have access to what 20 years ago was much more exclusive to the wealthy and famous, but I think it's much more sinister than that. The culture of today's obsession with perfection has conflated the idea that regular women need to spend thousands of dollars to be beautiful, opening the gates for corporations to medicalize women's insecurities and make them pay for the cure. The normalization of cosmetic surgery on social media is one of my main concerns, one where I'm not alone as it was by far the most brought up factor across my research. Instagram was founded in 2010, with TikTok coming six years later in 2016. And these two apps have had a massive impact on American culture and stand at the center of social media, seeing over millions of posts a day. This brought on the age of influencers, social media creators with a large following who are able to broadcast every detail of their lives to their audiences and oftentimes form parasocial relationships through laid back content and realness. Social media is highly staked on appearance and being attractive often preempts the individual's popularity online. As a result of this focus, certain features are sensationalized online as the best or most on trend, with many times audiences being marketed cosmetic procedures or surgeries to help them look more like their favorite influencer. In her 2019 article for the New Yorker titled, The Age of Instagram Face, Gia Tolentino drew on her time living in LA as a prime example of this. Tolentino reported an eerie sameness in the faces she saw online and in person, with everyone having matching features like small noses, full lips, big eyes, and sharp jawlines. She noted that what had emerged was a cyborgian face assigned to already beautiful women, line washing traits that don't fit into the Instagram face mold, or often ones that don't fit the white face mold. As previously relatable influencers become the new age celebrities, the affluence and status that online personalities have has shifted and thereby fooled a lot of women into falling victim to this. Influencers whose content once felt like that of a personal friend or regular person are able to use their newfound wealth to get cosmetic procedures and market them to their audience as normal. As more people strive for the influencer look, the content surrounding cosmetic surgery on apps like TikTok has only gained popularity. As of me writing this, the hashtag hashtag facelift has over 2.8 billion years, with hashtag lip filler having 6 billion and hashtag BBL having almost 11 billion. With millions of American women taking in content like this daily, it's easy to see that cosmetic surgery has reached a level of normalcy never seen before, and this is something that plastic surgeons on the other side of the scalpel have noticed too. In an interview with the Washington Post, Beta Connis, a facial plastic surgeon in Baltimore and the president of the American Academy of Facial Plastics and Reconstructive Surgery, detailed what changes she's seen in the industry and has social media influenced patients. She compares, My older patients will come in and say, I just want to look better. I don't like this. I'm not sure what I need. The younger patients come in and say, I want fillers in my cheeks. I want Botox here and I don't want to have crow's feet. They know exactly what they want and they know what it does. This change in customer knowledge can be seen in a positive or negative light, where some might see an educated consumer who knows exactly what she wants. Others might see a client who has nitpicked her face and thinks that these specifics will grant her the physical perfection seen and often edited online. As women come to their surgeons with more specific demands, it becomes apparent how this cyborgian face mentioned by Tolentino earlier comes to life. The commercialization of cosmetic surgery in recent years can be attributed to a lot of things, influencer posts, algorithm-based ads on social media, and in television and other media outlets. Outside of what I previously said about influencer marketing, TikTok influencers present a specific problem. On TikTok right now, it's currently against policy for cosmetic plastic surgeons to directly market their services. Now by paying or bribing influencers with free services, influencers can get a procedure and do the advertising for them to audiences of a huge size. This workaround is a big reason as to why so much cosmetic surgery content is featured on the app. Social media apps like TikTok also utilize algorithm-based advertising, which basically uses the information it's gathered from you to cater specific ads to you. As women make up 95% of cosmetic surgery recipients, women are highly likely to be marketed some form of cosmetic intervention anytime they go online. For the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, Chad Wheeler's 2011 journal article, Social Media and Plastic Surgery Practices, Emerging Trends in North America, reported that in 2010, only 30% of plastic surgeons reported using social media for advertising. Now in 2023, the ASPS reports that almost 70% of cosmetic surgeons have a professional social media account that they use for promotion. As women under the age of 30 are a concentrated market on social media, the new age of instant advertisements has changed the game for the industry. However, mainstream media still plays a huge role in the commercializing of plastic surgery. In her book, The Ways Women Age Using and Refusing Cosmetic Intervention, Abigail Brooks presents ad slogans used by companies who make injectables in magazines and on television. One Dysport ad read, take charge of your front lines. Don't surrender to a look that's not you. This slogan presents a number of issues, the main one being that it presents aging as something unnatural or to be corrected. By making this statement, the advertisers for Dysport tell women that without cosmetic intervention, they'll somehow lose their real self, something contradictory to the fact that it's an alteration to the realness of aging naturally. Tabloids and magazines are also extremely well known for putting female celebrities on blast for having or not having, funny enough, cosmetic surgery. Specifically, in the early 2000s and 2010s, headlines and stories about cosmetic surgery often featured Hollywood stars like the Kardashians or the Real Housewives and focused on sniffing out if they had gotten work done. A famous example of this was in 2016 when nepotism superstar Kylie Jenner confirmed accusations, ones that she had previously denied, of getting lip filler. This resulted in a cultural snowball as she used this headline as promo for the infamous Kylie lip kits that put her cosmetic brand on the map. As a possible result, lip filler saw a 70% increase between 2000 and 2016, according to the ASPS, and is still today one of the most popular minimally invasive procedures. This leads into what I think could be a resolution for the adverse effects of cosmetic surgery's current popularity. When asked by Nicola Ripps in a 2023 interview with Homegirls Magazine, Jenner responded to a question about her filler saying, Jenner's honesty opened the gate for celebrities and regular women to be honest and open with the cosmetic procedures, setting a good example with a level of honesty not always seen in the case of celebrities and also giving important perspective that you don't need to be perfect after cosmetic intervention. It also has a good message on moderation and focusing on personal insecurities rather than insecurities instilled by comparison culture. I think that if more social media or Hollywood figures were honest about what they've had done and their own thought processes, it would ease a lot of American women's insecurities they've obtained from comparing themselves to someone with endless money to change themselves. As well as this, I believe cosmetic surgery practitioners should be held accountable when assessing if a client has unrealistic expectations or is hyper fixating on having the perfect social media mug. In a 2019 article for the Washington Post, cosmetic plastic surgeon Dr. Darya Hamra offers a great example of this accountability. She writes, She says, find peace in refusing intervention and embracing their natural look.