Tag: Fillers

I take a keen interest in beauty trends, including the more invasive types of treatments out there like injectables. For about ten years, lip fillers have been trending big time. But that plumped up look–first popularized by Kylie Jenner–may be on its way out. Celebs like Blac Chyna and Amy Schumer have recently had filler removed, and they’re not the only ones. Yahoo Life interviewed plastic surgeons, nurse injectors, and influencers who talked about how complications from fillers and changing trends are leading people to dissolve their filler.

The long shadow of the Jenndashians: Kylie Jenner has set plenty of trends in her time. From blue hair and chokers to matte lipstick and face-snatching contour, Jenner’s “King Kylie” era changed the way many young people approached style and beauty throughout the mid-2010s.


But the height of her influence, one could argue, came by way of her filled lips and accompanying pout products. “Kylie with all her Kylie Lip Kits and the filler, that was the look back then. It was crazy,” Jade Mitchell-Clyde, a 24-year-old Los Angeles-based content creator, reflects on for Yahoo Life. But recently, Mitchell-Clyde and a horde of other former filler fans have been having their injectables — lip and otherwise — removed.

Overfilling leaves the filler with nowhere to go: Ginille Brown, a cosmetic nurse practitioner based in Los Angeles, says overfilling could also contribute to the rise in migration discourse online. “When you’re just trying to force product into a space, and doing it way too quickly, and the lip hasn’t had time to expand, the [filler] goes above the border of the lip,” says Brown. “I have patients who have paper-thin lips, and they want really full lips, and I have to tell them that even if I were to put six syringes of filler in you, your anatomy is not going to allow it.”

This trend is big on TikTok: The #lipfillerdissolved, and #lipfillerremoval hashtags alone have nearly 28 million and 10 million views, respectively, and there was a 57% increase in filler reversals from 2020 to 2021, according to a 2022 trend report by the Aesthetic Society.

[From Yahoo]

Kylie Jenner was deeply influential in the lip filler craze of the early 2010s. I remember being in college and seeing Kylie with suddenly massive lips. It changed how I did my makeup, right down to the lip colors I chose. People don’t want to give the Jenndashian clan credit, but they do know how to start trends. Funnily enough though, I’ve never bought anything from Kylie’s makeup line.

While the TikTok interest in filler removal is big, I’m not sure it foretells an equally large shift in the number of people getting fillers in the first place. I think people will just start using fillers in more subtle ways and getting smaller amounts. Even one of the influencers in the Yahoo article admits that after getting her lip filler dissolved, she went back for more, just a much smaller quantity.


I got half a syringe of lip filler for the first time last year. My face is very asymmetrical and I just wanted my lips to look more even and balanced. The results are subtle, and I still look like myself, just enhanced by a couple of millimeters. A good injector, like the one I had, will not pressure you into getting more than you need. She actually stopped injecting before we had used the full vial because, as she put it, “you have room, but not that much.”

I love my lip injections and I’ll keep getting half a syringe once a year. I also believe that we shouldn’t shame people for getting injectables of any kind, even if we may disagree with their choices. But it sure is a weird time in beauty. Between fillers going out of style and the buccal fat removal craze from earlier this year, it seems like the trends are shifting back to an aesthetic of thinness, even in our faces. At least that’s the undercurrent I’m picking up on.

photos via Instagram and credit: Avalon.red

For all the talk about buccal fat removal and “Ozempic face,” NY Mag’s The Cut published an interesting article about plastic surgery trends and the effects of fillers and their subsequent dissolution. The initial trend was to look more full-faced and youthful, “pillowy,” if you will. They used Kylie Jenner as their example for that. And the new trend is to look “snatched” like Bella Hadid, which includes (of course) buccal fat removal. So that involves first dissolving fillers and by the way people also dissolve fillers because they migrate and start to look crazy and the stories/videos included in the article are terrifying.

Since roughly 2016, millions of people have gone to dermatologists to put things in their faces with one particular goal: to look like sexy babies. The way they achieved this was with filler — generally acid and fat injections. This era of filler created a specific aesthetic marked by heart-shaped faces, teeny-tiny noses, and full, puffy lips and cheeks.

Quite recently, faces have begun to go the opposite way.

“I can’t remember the last time somebody asked me for big, juicy, plump lips,” says Dhaval Bhanusali, the doctor behind Martha Stewart’s ageless skin.

If you know famous faces, the transition can be defined as this: “Everyone wanted to look like Kylie Jenner. Now they want to look like Bella Hadid,” says Matthew James, a British makeup artist and beauty influencer who used fillers for ten years to look “a bit pillowy.”

One reason for the shift? It turns out fillers weren’t the elixir of youth people wanted them to be. Over time, many a filler enthusiast found the substance was actually migrating around the face.

“It was marketed as this riskless thing,” says Carly Raye, a Toronto-based content creator who got lip fillers at 20. She had a common experience: Her filler traveled, creating a ring of puffiness around her lips that various surgeons have described as the “Juvéderm mustache,” “duck lips,” or “Homer Simpson face.”

Filler could pile up anywhere. “I would smile and I had little bulges on the tops of my cheeks,” says Rosie Genute, a Jersey-based makeup artist, of her wandering under-eye filler.

Raye and Genute, like many other patients, were led to believe that minimal risks were involved and that though migration was possible, it was unlikely. What’s more, patients were often told filler would disappear quickly. That isn’t always the case. “We say that filler only lasts a year, but that’s completely false. It most often lasts a lot longer,” says Sagar Patel, a Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon.

Why all this new information about fillers now? It seems that everyone — from providers to patients — simply didn’t know that much about the stuff to begin with. And maybe they still don’t.

[From The Cut]

So I wasn’t really planning on fillers and don’t need lip injections, but this article truly terrified me. Like, you get fillers to look a certain way, but then they migrate and you end up looking another way. And yes, it’s reversible with the dissolving, like Amy Schumer and Simon Cowell talked about. But the patients in the article say that dissolving can be painful, like acid in your face, which makes sense considering the word — dissolving! And even after dissolving things might not look great. The anecdote about young woman shifting around her loose facial skin post-dissolution in the full article may haunt my dreams. The fact that there are facial trends that require this much effort, maintenance, and potential complications is a lot. Like one of the sources in the article says, it’s this pursuit of ultra-perfection that makes people think everything is fixable/changeable. And it seems exhausting! I’m exhausted enough by my skincare routine, I couldn’t imagine doing all this. Haircuts and makeup are things that should go in and out of fashion, not faces!

Photos credit: Cover Images/Instar and via Instagram