Every year we talk about certain plastic surgery procedures becoming more desirable or less so, the same way we might talk about jeans styles or heel heights. Is it disconcerting to think that surgical changes to your face or body could be influenced by trends? Well, sure. After all, these choices are a lot more permanent than swapping skinny jeans for boot cuts. But the fact remains that plastic surgery does not exist in a vacuum — it’s influenced by the economy, by technology, and by lifestyle and cultural shifts. So, just as there are trends in makeup or hair or denim, there too are trends in plastic surgery.
Some are spurred by innovations in surgical techniques and even fat injections: Both have helped facelifts become more natural over the years. So natural that in 2023, patients may approach them as part of a long-term maintenance plan instead of the one-and-done surgery they used to be. Another consideration for the facelift’s trend status in 2023: “Facelifts have [historically] been pretty recession-proof,” says Steven Teitelbaum, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, California. And with a recession looming, plastic surgeons are expecting to see them among a handful of procedures eclipsing others over the coming year (more on that in a few).
Meet the Experts
- Steven Williams, MD, a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Dublin, California, and president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons
- Julius Few, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Chicago and Los Angeles
- Steven Teitelbaum, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Santa Monica, California
The new year’s plastic surgery trends are also an extension of injectable trends, to some extent. Patients who are used to tweaking their face with Botox or filler may be looking for more long-lasting or aesthetically different results. “Right now, the biggest fear that most people have about doing cosmetic treatments, whether it’s surgical or nonsurgical, is looking unnatural,” says Julius Few, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Chicago and Los Angeles. So the procedures that are rising to the top will likely be ones that create small but impactful changes to the face. “That’s number one. Also, if you can do something in a way that minimizes recovery downtime, that is the way to go,” says Dr. Few.
Here, the three trends — and five procedures — set to drive the plastic surgery business in 2023:
Facelifts in your ’40s will be a thing — only they’re more like facelifts lite.
“I have people come in all the time in their mid to late 40s debating, ‘do I do a facelift?,'” says Dr. Few. “That’s become a much more common discussion, compared to even two years ago.” The facelift they’re mulling over is “not your mother’s facelift that was this super-pulled Saran Wrap kind of result,” says Dr. Few. Excess skin is still removed but, at a younger age, there’s not much sagging, so there’s typically not a ton of skin to cut off. The muscles underneath the jawline and neck are tightened, “but there’s not that much [to do there]. It makes the process a bit faster, a bit more predictable,” says Dr. Few, who typically injects cheeks with a patient’s own fat at the same time to “balance where the lifting is happening, so that you don’t look too tightly pulled. It’s much more three-dimensional now than it ever has been.” That’s a big deal in the plastic surgery world: “Evolutions in fat injections play a big role in [making facelifts more natural],” says Dr. Teitelbaum.
