Opinion: More young men are coming to me for plastic surgery. The way I think about them has changed

There are more men sitting in my plastic surgery waiting room now than ever before. If I had to choose one word to describe the men I see today, it would be “influenced.” Procedures on men in the U.S. have grown by 4%, a rate that makes men the fastest growing population in aesthetics. In 2024, men underwent 1.6 million minimally invasive cosmetic procedures and almost 100,000 surgical procedures in the United States. The young men I see come in with screenshots from apps that tell them what they are “supposed to” look like, selfies highlighting their asymmetries, and names of influencers I look up after they leave; the young women I see come in with the same things. I’m grateful when they ask me if taping their mouths shut while they sleep and bone crushing work (to be clear: they don’t) because it is a sign that they have insight to recognize what may be too good to be true. Most importantly, it is a sign that they trust me. They ask for procedures I would never personally recommend had they not come in with a specific request. I wonder how many selfies they must have taken to realize that their nose looks different on one side than the other. As a mom myself, I wonder how worried their parents must be as they tell me, “I really don’t think he needs this, but I’m here anyway.” At the same time, I wonder if these children are getting bullied for their noses, cheek bones, or jaw structure in a way that will leave a more permanent scar than surgery. When I see influencers like Clavicular on Instagram (yes, I do follow him), I wonder how someone presenting such little truth could have such a huge following. His recommendation to take college loans to pay for plastic surgery so that young men can “mog” boggles my mind. But what I have realized is that influencers like Clavicular, while wrong about their treatment recommendations, are correct in their diagnosis: We have built an economy that pays people for how they look. Over the past decade, the attention economy has placed a financial premium on physical appearance. Since the pandemic, people have spent hours looking at their own faces on video calls, noticing asymmetries they never saw before. The “Zoom boom” is a statistically significant and sustained increase in facial plastic procedures related to the fact that people stare at themselves on screen for hours a day. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have made beauty measurable and monetizable. Research has found a relationship between higher follower counts, higher ratings of physical attractiveness, and likeability. Every week I see teenagers in my clinic whose career goal is to become an influencer. I used to tell them “I really want you to prioritize your education so that you can be financially independent,” but it often fell flat. The statistics I found on how much money content creators can make helped me realize they had read the incentive structure better than I had. It is no surprise to me that “looksmaxxing,” the practice of optimizing appearance through any available means, has gained traction among boys and young men. As a plastic surgeon, I have to be specific about the risks, because vague warnings have not worked. You can go permanently blind when you or anyone other than a nurse or doctor injects you with filler. You may require lifelong antibiotics for mycobacterial infections from improperly sterilized instruments. Bone crushing is simply a waste of time. It does not work. The results that you see online are due to puberty and/or weight loss. If you use testosterone at a young age, your testicles will shrink, you may be infertile, and you can prematurely stop growing. You can literally die from many of the treatments looksmaxxing influencers are recommending. But is it Clavicular who is responsible, or is it the people who have designed the incentive structures that have elevated the status and prestige of his misinformation? Young men, like many others, have watched the world tell them that how they look determines how much money they make, and as a result, where in society’s hierarchy they fit. In response, they have chosen to fall in line with the system others have created. The damage is measurable, particularly for the youngest among us. According to the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 40% of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, 20% considered suicide, and nearly 1 in 10 attempted it. The suicide rate among young people ages 10 to 24 has increased by 57% over the past decade. Kids who spend upwards of three hours daily on social media are twice as likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety; the average teenager now spends three and a half hours a day on these platforms. For boys specifically, depression rates are up 161% since 2010. Suicide rates for men ages 25–34 rose 30% in this timeframe. A 2025 survey of over 3,000 young men ages 16–25 found that almost two-thirds were frequently exposed to “masculinity influencer” content. I see these numbers reflected in my clinic. Monetized medical misinformation is a public health issue. When companies aren’t willing to prioritize our children’s well-being over profit despite the well-documented harms of their technologies, it is hard to imagine that the system will ever change. There are, however, real solutions that do not require companies to sacrifice their bottom line. Zoom and Microsoft Teams already offer a hide self-view toggle, but the default remains on. Changing default settings so that users only see themselves when they initially join costs nothing and requires no new technology. Decreasing the size of self-view windows on cell phones is another example of how we can decrease the time we look at ourselves while maintaining functionality. Increasing creator accountability is another approach. Platforms like Instagram already require creators to disclose paid sponsorships under Federal Trade Commission guidelines. Requiring disclosure when creators make medical claims is an extension of this requirement. Pharmaceutical companies have standards for accountability for advertisements. Similar regulations for influencers without medical degrees who recommend drugs, injectables, and surgery seem appropriate. Influencers and advertisers should be disincentivized from using filters. As a plastic surgeon, I can say with certainty that many filters present an aesthetic that is impossible to achieve even with surgery, and promote unrealistic beauty standards that contribute to body dysmorphia. Our brains cannot distinguish the falseness of this content because it is camouflaged so effectively. While one approach is to require labelling of any image in which the body’s shape, size, or skin tone is altered, studies have shown that disclosure alone does little. Importantly, however, labelling these images accurately represents a minimum requirement or transparency floor. Norway passed a law in 2021 requiring sponsored influencers to disclose any modification of photos using a ministry-approved label. France enacted similar laws in 2017, requiring any sponsored content to be labeled as “retouched.” The EU’s Digital Services Act requires large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks to public health, including the mental and physical well-being of minors, which means the legislative framework exists. These interventions do not infringe on freedom of speech or eliminate revenue systems. Another approach is to use social media algorithms to demote content that uses filters, or better yet, remove filters altogether. Removing options like “Retouch” from Instagram’s editing app, and using artificial intelligence to automatically flag and hide filtered content behind a sensitive image screen, like what is done for graphic content, are examples of basic protections for content marketed to our children. If attention is rewarded more than accuracy, appearance will be commodified. Young men will continue to think that you must look perfect to advance. The people willing to sell the promise of beauty will profit regardless of how many people they hurt as a result. The young men in my clinic are responding rationally to a system that was designed for profit. The question is whether we care about them enough to change it. Kavitha Ranganathan, M.D., M.S., is a board-certified plastic surgeon practicing in Boston. She is a plastic surgeon at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School who practices adult and pediatric plastic surgery. STAT’s coverage of health challenges facing men and boys is supported by Rise Together, a donor advised fund sponsored and administered by National Philanthropic Trust and established by Richard Reeves, founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men; and by the Boston Foundation. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.