{"id":1038896,"date":"2026-09-02T13:17:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1038896\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T13:17:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:17:18","slug":"plastic-surgery-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-many-people-are-actually-getting-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1038896\/","title":{"rendered":"Plastic surgery is on the rise. Here\u2019s how many people are actually getting it."},"content":{"rendered":"

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These days, I often have occasion to think about an episode of The Twilight Zone<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s 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 \u201cugliness,\u201d 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\u2019re exiled, as is the case with the episode\u2019s protagonist).<\/p>\n

It can feel as if we are moving toward a similar aesthetic conformity in our own world. In a recent New Yorker article, \u201cOur Plastic-Surgery Nightmare<\/a>,\u201d Jia Tolentino notes how, \u201cabout a decade ago, the most visible faces on Instagram\u2014those belonging to famous white models and influencers\u2014began to resemble one another,\u201d with \u201ctheir faces contoured by the algorithm.\u201d We\u2019ve watched celebrities undertake this shape-shifting toward pillowy lips, smooth foreheads, high cheekbones. Modern plastic surgery is so sophisticated as to be undetectable<\/a>, 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<\/a> might in 2026 resemble Kris Jenner<\/a>?<\/p>\n

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\u2014including surgeries and minimally invasive treatments, like fillers and injections\u2014are indeed increasing in popularity. This week, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported a 7\u00a0percent increase<\/a> in plastic surgeries from 2024 to 2025. Face-lifts in particular increased by 13\u00a0percent in 2025. Lifts of all sorts are, no pun intended, on the rise: forehead and brow lifts up 29\u00a0percent; arm lifts and neck lifts both up 21\u00a0percent. 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<\/a>) decreased.<\/p>\n

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\n Christina Cauterucci
\n More and More Women Are Opening Up About Something That Used to Be Shameful. I Wish They\u2019d Kept It All Secret.
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Cosmetic surgeries have been on the rise since 2009. From 2019 to 2022, there was a 19\u00a0percent bump\u2014perhaps 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<\/a>: consistent growth overall, with a surge postpandemic. Aesthetic procedure demand has continued to grow despite the economic uncertainty<\/a> of the past several years.<\/p>\n

But, contra a nightmare scenario, not everyone is getting plastic surgery. When considering the increase in procedures, it\u2019s important to remember that we\u2019re starting with numbers that are relatively low. Let\u2019s 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<\/a>\u20140.08\u00a0percent of the U.S. population at the time. In 2024 that figure rose to 349,728, about 0.1\u00a0percent 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\u00a0percent and 0.05\u00a0percent, respectively), with only eyelid lifts increasing\u2014all still less than 0.1\u00a0percent 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\u00a0percent) and how many people\u2019s major organs are mirrored in a reverse position (0.01 percent). More Americans watch The Bachelorette<\/a> (0.7\u00a0percent).<\/p>\n

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    Silicon Valley Is Making Its Wildest Promises Ever. This Number From Anthropic Proves It.
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    There\u2019s a New Report on Cosmetic Plastic Surgery. What\u2019s in It Could Change How You Think About Going Under the Knife.
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    Minimally invasive procedures are a bit of a different situation and are much harder to track since patients don\u2019t have to go to plastic surgeons for them. In the 2024 report, members of the ASPS recorded more than 28\u00a0million such treatments, 3\u00a0million 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\u00a0percent of the population\u2014and even that would be an undercount, since you can go to stand-alone med spas or dermatologists to get them\u2014but we can safely presume that the same people were getting several of these procedures done, and likely several times. No one gets Instagram face<\/a> 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\u2014a face-lift, for example, lasts only 10 or so years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    The ASPS report rejects the notion that people who participate in surgery and injections are converging in their appearance, casting body modification as \u201cincreasingly a wellness decision.\u201d Umbareen Mahmood, a surgeon in the report, notes: \u201cWhat surgeons are hearing is that patients want to feel like a better restored version of themselves, not a different version.\u201d Regardless, should you ever feel that many people around you are looking increasingly smooth, there\u2019s an easy solution that does not require Twilight Zone\u2013style 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1038897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[11],"tags":[19534,210,1184,1183,67,132,68,16966],"class_list":["post-1038896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-beauty","tag-health","tag-medicine","tag-research","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-women"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117201645097576256","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1038897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}