Selfie Awareness: Millennials and Generation Z Love Plastic Surgery

There used to be a stigma associated with plastic surgery. However, that stigma is disappearing faster than landlines in homes.

Baby Boomers and the older end of Generation X used to think that plastic surgery was reserved for the super-rich and the superficial. This was mainly because the only people they saw getting work done were celebrities, and the work often looked pretty obvious. 

But more advanced and accessible techniques have combined with new pressures from social media to lead Millennials and Generation Z to see plastic surgery differently. 

Social Media and Social Pressures 

Think of the world that older generations grew up in. 

They may have had a dozen or so pictures of them taken in a year, with a handful showing up in frames around the house. But today’s generation will take and appear in dozens of pictures every day, and their tagged image will show up on social media whether they like it or not.

An unflattering candid shot can be enough to send a person down a rabbit hole of looking at before and after photos of liposuction procedures. This has been particularly prevalent during the COVID-19 lockdown as millions of people are dealing with weight gain, or the so-called Quarantine 15.

Make Me Look Like Myself(ie)

Previous generations would also probably use a picture of a celebrity as a guide when talking to a plastic surgeon. They had to theorize how Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman’s nose would look on their face. 

However, today’s plastic surgery patients can show their surgeons exactly how they want to look by showing them a filtered or touched-up selfie. In fact, 55% of Millennial-aged plastic surgery patients used a selfie to explain what they wanted. This is leading to better conversations and better outcomes.
 

Millennials Enter Their 40s 

The older end of the Millennial generation has recently celebrated their 40th birthday. This means they are now:

1.     Financially secure in their career
2.     Have had all the children they plan on having
3.     Seeing the signs of aging showing up in the mirror 

This is why the Millennial generation is easily the fastest-growing demographic in plastic surgery. They currently account for about 25% of the entire plastic surgery market. They also accounted for about 37% of all breast augmentation surgeries in North America in 2019 and 35% of all liposuction procedures.

Right now, a 35-year-old Millennial is statistically more likely to get a plastic surgery procedure than a Baby Boomer, and the gap is only going to widen as Millennials age.

This means that Generation Z will be the first generation to truly grow up in a world where their parents had plastic surgery. Plastic surgery will be de-stigmatized and normalized.

These trends are only being hastened by the COVID-19 lockdown. In fact, The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) surveyed 1000 people and 49% of respondents said that they were open to the idea of getting their first-ever plastic surgery. In 2014, a similar study revealed that only about 17% of those surveyed were open to the idea.

This is a guest blog entry.