A few months into the pandemic, post-Tiger King and pre-The Vow, I decided to do something about my cyst. Mine was a tiny bump hidden in my nasolabial fold, barely visible to the eye, but still bothering me. One night, while watching TLC star Dr. Sandra “Pimple Popper” Lee bandage a patient’s face, I realized that there couldn’t have been a better time to get rid of it. First, thanks to social distancing measures, I barely went anywhere or saw anyone except my boyfriend. Second, I wore a mask every time I left the house. The tie-dyed silk face covering I’d just ordered from Kes was both a fashionable prevention against illness and the perfect post-op camouflage. Plus, I told myself, dermatologists and plastic surgeons’ offices must be deserted because of COVID fears, right?
That’s not true. Demand for cosmetic surgery has increased significantly throughout the pandemic, with practitioners reporting a surge in bookings. There’s no hard data on the phenomenon yet, but anecdotally, the experience of Michigan-based plastic surgeon M. Azar Ali, MD, seems typical. “It’s been completely crazy since we reopened in June,” says Ali. “My workload is probably double what it normally is,” and “the calls are coming in nonstop,” agrees Samuel Lin, MD, a plastic surgeon and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. Lin noted in August that he’s seen a 30 percent increase in procedures, particularly eyelid lifts and rhinoplasties, compared to the same time last year.
The sales boost isn’t hard to understand. Thanks to the much-publicized Zoom effect, wrinkles, sagging cheeks, and sagging eyelids that were once unnoticeable are now constantly flashed before us on 13-inch LED screens. Meanwhile, gym closures and stay-at-home orders have stalled quarantine fitness, which has led to increased interest in body-contouring techniques like EmSculpt, says Amy Schechter, CEO of Ever/Body, a cosmetic dermatology clinic in New York City. At Ever/Body, the popular non-surgical muscle-tightening device that uses high-intensity electromagnetic energy to firm the abs and buttocks has garnered a lot of attention. And for many women, including me, the timing is hard to argue with. “The moment they shut down, I was like, oh my God, I need to get surgery,” recalls Candice Marino, a facial aesthetician in Los Angeles who received her much-desired VASER liposuction procedure from Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Charles Galanis in May. “Because my job is so hands-on, there was no way I could fit a 2-4 week recovery period into my schedule. My only regret is not getting a breast augmentation either.” Similarly, Ali’s patient, 33-year-old Shirin Hernandez, had been saving up for a “full mommy makeover” (breast augmentation, liposuction, muscle repair, and abdominoplasty), but finally decided to get it done this fall because she knew she could recuperate at home. “Before, I would have had to take time off work,” she notes, “but now, since I can’t go to work anyway…”
“Even the luckiest people, they all lose some control over their lives. One way to cope with that is to learn something. That might mean learning a new language or having cosmetic surgery.”
Lockdown healing is convenient and surreptitious. Marino tells me that many of her celebrity clients have had the procedure done in the past six months. It’s “everything they’ve been waiting for,” she says, precisely because they can recover in secret. I thought the same. Dr. Lara Devgan, the sought-after Upper East Side surgeon who removed my cyst, stitched up the tiny incisions with haute couture-quality stitches, but the only person other than me who got to admire her masterful work was my boyfriend. Masks hide the stitches, obscuring the now-painful but fading scars. The fact that so many of us are connecting with the world via FaceTime may explain the surge in rhinoplasties observed by surgeons such as Harvard’s Lin and Sean Desai, MD, assistant professor of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins University. “Cellphone selfies make noses look larger or misshapen than they are, so nose problems seem more urgent.” The rash of sensational news stories is certainly fueling what Desai calls a “perfect storm of demand.” While it may not be strictly true that we’ve all aged 10 years in the past 10 months (although various studies have shown that chronic stress can accelerate aging), it certainly seems that way, especially when early morning video conferences after sleepless nights accentuate bags under the eyes. “People aren’t going on vacations, they’re not eating out at restaurants, they’re feeling depressed and panicked, and they want to cheer themselves up,” Ali theorizes. In fact, every doctor I spoke to for this article mentioned this “feel good” factor.
I’d also argue that boredom is a big, unanalyzed cause of the current boom in cosmetic surgery. I’ll use myself as example A. Shocked away from my usual routine of work, travel, exercise, socializing, I had time to obsess over what seemed to be a non-dangerous, nearly invisible cyst. And once the cyst was gone, the obsession shifted to my neck. During countless Zoom calls, I noticed some pale lines along my throat. I immediately tried to solve that with a session of the collagen-stimulating Morpheus8, Ever/Body’s popular radiofrequency microneedling device, and was greeted at the door by a thermometer-wielding receptionist and escorted to a hyper-sanitized treatment pod by a nurse wearing a giant face shield (#pandemiclife). I wasn’t bored during the painful 45 minutes of having needles stuck in me. But as soon as I left the clinic, I began pondering again the existential questions of how I was going to spend the rest of this day, the rest of this strange year, the rest of this indeterminate pause in life. As usual, I put these thoughts aside and went home to watch Dr. Pimple Popper.
