New Trend: Using Fillers and Injectables to Mimic Instagram Filters

Let me start by saying that I think my face is doing OK, looks-wise. It is mostly symmetrical except for the bottom half, which is covered by a beard anyway, so you can hardly tell. If you spin around three times and glance in my direction, I bear a passing resemblance to a budget Ryan Reynolds. Google “nose” and the image results look similar to mine. All things considered, I’m doing fine.

Or I was, until I downloaded Instagram for the first time and discovered I was a swamp goblin fraudulently squatting in a Utopian, beautiful-people kingdom. There are infinitesimal angles from which to take a photo of your face, and I look humanoid in almost two of them. Failing to convey my sense of humor and joie de vivre, digital photos of me confirm that I resemble a person but unfortunately cannot say much more than that. The front-facing iPhone camera, once a feature of convenience for users who also do their makeup on their commute, has now become a handheld torture device, inflicting constant self-­examination. What a time to be alive!

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Disguised as a glimpse into someone’s intimate life, social media usually succeeds in presenting just one version of reality: a portrait of carefully selected assets and details that compose an incomplete, if totally gorgeous, representation of an otherwise real person. We know this, and we opt in anyway because it’s fun. But there’s a danger in catering to our own vanity, and with apps like Facetune (which has reigned supreme in the App Store since launching in 2013) and countless other tools and filters, we can airbrush our lives to perfection. This happens in many ways but is especially true with pictures of people. Smoothing out your complexion or tightening up a jawline is not only acceptable; it’s a common practice. I once observed a woman Facetune her toddler while waiting in line at Starbucks.

In a stunning feat of circuity, the desire for filtered faces has infiltrated the offices of dermatologists and plastic surgeons like Dara Liotta, who has been injecting Botox and hyaluronic fillers at the behest of patients who want to look a little bit more like their digital selves. She even developed a Botox-and-filler package, the LitLift, to try to re-create that perfectly balanced highlight-to-shadow filter finish: “I took tons of selfies with the regular unfiltered camera, then selfies with the most natural-looking Snapchat and Instagram filters and compared them side by side,” she tells me of her research methods. “My go-to filters were the rosy-cheek ­smiling ­face on Snapchat and the white­sparkle-­dust filter on Instagram.” Of her millennial clientele, Liotta estimates more than 90 percent reference social media filters when they consult for injectables.

So here I am, at the doorstep of dermatologist Macrene Alexiades’s Park Avenue practice — a series of bleached corridors nestled within a building I cannot even fantasize about affording — asking to be carved into a new form: a Snapchat filter. Alexiades is one of the best cosmetic dermatologists in New York City because she isn’t one — or isn’t only one. She’s a trained sculptor with a Harvard education who also happens to be a board-certified dermatologist. Today she still sculpts, but her medium has changed to the faces of those who can afford her services — and me. She’s not so into the abstract stuff; she prefers realism, the natural, Immanuel Kant theory of beauty. This is comforting to hear, if confusing to process.

I tell her I want to look like a Snapchat filter, and she laughs, which is an appropriate response because I sound like a lunatic. But she doesn’t laugh because it’s a ridiculous request; she laughs because she’s the perfect person for the job. “You know, some of my clients say that I’m their Adobe Photoshop,” she tells me. Her daughters are on Snapchat, and she’s seen what filters can do for the face. It’s incredible, isn’t it? She’s happy to do it for me.

The paradox of the fillers market is this: As the popularity of hyaluronic acid injectables soars, the dosage gets smaller and smaller, as patients request more natural-­looking tweaks instead of dramatic changes. This movement toward subtlety picked up steam in 2016 with the FDA approval of Juvéderm Volbella XC, which combines multiple molecular weights of hyaluronic acid for a softer fill. Botox has enjoyed a similar increase in reduction: “Baby Botox” as a search term spiked 5 percent this year on realself​.com, a significant figure for a website that averages 10 million monthly visitors.

I show Alexiades a photo of myself using the Snapchat filter that washes over your face, chiseling out your features and evening your skin tone as it goes, and she translated it to this: a curve of injections starting at the top of my ear, just behind my hairline, swooping down along my cheekbone. The feeling can best be described literally: It’s six needles to the face.

The topography of my face changes slightly but powerfully. “New” cheekbones gleam under the white office lights, casting twin shadow valleys on either side of my nose. The hairline injections tug the skin back over my jawline ever so slightly — for the first time in my life I have a chin and a neck instead of a hybrid slope. Alexiades steps back and marvels like Michelangelo: “I love it!” she says. Another sculpture completed, one you can take home for the price of $1,200. She asks me to sleep on my back for the night to let the clay set.

The reality: Fillers are a temporary (and expensive) change and certainly not a long-term remedy for any sort of image-related anxiety. (In my opinion, Instagram should be preserved as a meme gallery only.) But the trend is an interesting digression from the “pumped-up” fillers of yore in favor of smaller, subtler, neoclassical gestures. Whichever you do, find a doctor you trust to do it, preferably one who brings up aesthetics theory in your consultation. Kylie is a fine reference, but Kant might suit you better.

A version of this article originally appeared in the May 2018 issue of Allure. To get your copy, head to newsstands or subscribe now.

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