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These days, I often have occasion to think about an episode of The Twilight Zone that aired in 1960, in which a woman is recovering from her 11th round of plastic surgery in an attempt to become beautiful. When her bandages are unwrapped, she’s devastated to learn that her face is still symmetrical, with a thin nose, unblemished skin, and full lips. In this alternate universe, beautiful people have pig snouts, distorted mouths, and sagging cheeks.

What’s striking to me is not the message that beauty standards are arbitrary, which is a nice takeaway, but the fact that she is abnormal in her “ugliness,” such as it is defined. In this context, everyone who deviates from the pig-snout-and-saggy norm gets plastic surgery to look the same (or else they’re exiled, as is the case with the episode’s protagonist).

It can feel as if we are moving toward a similar aesthetic conformity in our own world. In a recent New Yorker article, “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare,” Jia Tolentino notes how, “about a decade ago, the most visible faces on Instagram—those belonging to famous white models and influencers—began to resemble one another,” with “their faces contoured by the algorithm.” We’ve watched celebrities undertake this shape-shifting toward pillowy lips, smooth foreheads, high cheekbones. Modern plastic surgery is so sophisticated as to be undetectable, even when intended to make you look like a different person from the one you started out as. Who would have ever thought, a couple of decades ago, that Lindsay Lohan might in 2026 resemble Kris Jenner?

Are we all going to have the same dolphin-smooth faces soon, with filler and face-lifts simply the price of admission for participating in polite society? Cosmetic procedures—including surgeries and minimally invasive treatments, like fillers and injections—are indeed increasing in popularity. This week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported a 7 percent increase in plastic surgeries from 2024 to 2025. Face-lifts in particular increased by 13 percent in 2025. Lifts of all sorts are, no pun intended, on the rise: forehead and brow lifts up 29 percent; arm lifts and neck lifts both up 21 percent. Eyelid lifts were one of the top five cosmetic surgeries last year; if you hang out in a certain corner of Instagram, you might not be able to escape the term bleph, short for blepharoplasty. The number of both rhinoplasties and Brazilian butt lifts (known for having a risky death rate) decreased.

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Cosmetic surgeries have been on the rise since 2009. From 2019 to 2022, there was a 19 percent bump—perhaps because people got self-conscious from staring at themselves on Zoom calls all day, suggests C. Bob Basu, a board-certified plastic surgeon and the president of the ASPS. (Perhaps also because when the world is experiencing a pandemic and there is a profound loss of control, you can at least exercise control over your face.) These trends mimic global ones: consistent growth overall, with a surge postpandemic. Aesthetic procedure demand has continued to grow despite the economic uncertainty of the past several years.

But, contra a nightmare scenario, not everyone is getting plastic surgery. When considering the increase in procedures, it’s important to remember that we’re starting with numbers that are relatively low. Let’s take a look at four of the most popular cosmetic treatments in the U.S., which, according to surveys with ASPS member surgeons, are the same today as they were nearly 30 years ago. In 1999 the ASPS reported that 230,865 people got liposuction—0.08 percent of the U.S. population at the time. In 2024 that figure rose to 349,728, about 0.1 percent of the population. That is still a tiny, tiny sliver. (The ASPS notes that because its methodology has changed multiple times over the years, the numbers in the two reports are not apples-to-apples comparisons. My point in doing so anyway is to highlight just how small these figures are.) Breast augmentation and tummy tucks have remained at the same percentage since 1999 (0.09 percent and 0.05 percent, respectively), with only eyelid lifts increasing—all still less than 0.1 percent of the population. To put that in context, the amount of people going under the knife each year for any given procedure is in the ballpark of how many people have two differently colored eyes (0.06 percent) and how many people’s major organs are mirrored in a reverse position (0.01 percent). More Americans watch The Bachelorette (0.7 percent).


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Minimally invasive procedures are a bit of a different situation and are much harder to track since patients don’t have to go to plastic surgeons for them. In the 2024 report, members of the ASPS recorded more than 28 million such treatments, 3 million more than the year before. This category includes Botox, fillers, chemical peels, dermabrasion, laser hair removal, nonsurgical fat reduction and skin tightening, and weight-loss medication such as GLP-1s. (Many plastic surgeons also manage weight loss, ASPS member surgeon Sara Dickie told me, so, similarly, people who get them from other doctors would not have been captured in this survey.) If each procedure were received by a separate person, that adds up to a whopping 8 percent of the population—and even that would be an undercount, since you can go to stand-alone med spas or dermatologists to get them—but we can safely presume that the same people were getting several of these procedures done, and likely several times. No one gets Instagram face from one annual visit to a doctor. Many of these procedures require regular visits every few months, like hair appointments. To truly maintain even hardcore interventions, you need to do them again and again—a face-lift, for example, lasts only 10 or so years.

The ASPS report rejects the notion that people who participate in surgery and injections are converging in their appearance, casting body modification as “increasingly a wellness decision.” Umbareen Mahmood, a surgeon in the report, notes: “What surgeons are hearing is that patients want to feel like a better restored version of themselves, not a different version.” Regardless, should you ever feel that many people around you are looking increasingly smooth, there’s an easy solution that does not require Twilight Zone–style exile from society: Expand your social horizons a bit. Like many wellness practices that promise to make us better and more beautiful, this one is relatively niche.