Opinion: More young men are coming to me for plastic surgery. The way I think about them has changed
More men are appearing in the author’s plastic surgery waiting room than ever before, and the author would describe them as “influenced.” Procedures on men in the U.S. have grown by 4%, making men the fastest-growing population in aesthetics. In 2024, men underwent 1.6 million minimally invasive cosmetic procedures and almost 100,000 surgical procedures in the United States.
The young men the author sees arrive with screenshots from apps that tell them what they are “supposed to” look like, selfies highlighting their asymmetries, and the names of influencers they look up after the visit; the young women bring the same things. The author is grateful when patients ask about taping their mouths shut while sleeping and bone crushing work—because it shows they have insight to recognize what may be too good to be true, and more importantly that they trust the author. They ask for procedures the author would never personally recommend had they not come in with a specific request. The author wonders how many selfies they must have taken to realize one side of their nose looks different from the other. As a mom, the author also wonders how worried their parents must be when they say, “I really don’t think he needs this, but I’m here anyway.” At the same time, the author wonders whether these children are being bullied over their noses, cheekbones, or jaw structure in a way that will leave a more permanent scar than surgery.
Regarding influencers, the author follows Clavicular on Instagram and wonders how someone presenting such little truth could have such a huge following. His recommendation to take college loans to pay for plastic surgery so young men can “mog” boggles the author’s mind. But the author has realized that influencers like Clavicular, while wrong about their treatment recommendations, are correct in their diagnosis: we have built an economy that pays people for how they look.
Over the past decade, the attention economy has placed a financial premium on physical appearance. Since the pandemic, people have spent hours looking at their own faces on video calls, noticing asymmetries they never saw before. The “Zoom boom” is a statistically significant and sustained increase in facial plastic procedures related to people staring at themselves on screen for hours a day. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have made beauty measurable and monetizable. Research has found a relationship between higher follower counts, higher ratings of physical attractiveness, and likeability.
Every week, the author sees teenagers in clinic whose career goal is to become an influencer. The author used to tell them to prioritize education so they could be financially independent, but that often fell flat. Statistics on how much money content creators can make helped the author realize they had read the incentive structure better than the author had. The excerpt closes by noting the author is not surprised by “looksmaxxing,” described as “the practice of optimiz” before the text cuts off.