BEAUTY: THE GREAT COSMETIC UNDOING

Legions who flocked to dermatologists and plastic surgeons to be filled and plumped now seek to reverse their procedures. MARISA MELTZER surveys what they're getting undone now

MARISA MELTZER

VANITIES

Downsizing isn't just for empty nesters anymore. Med spas, dermatologists, and plastic surgeons are reporting that the pillowy, plumped-up look of the past decade is suddenly passé. But while it's relatively simple to transform platinum hair back to a natural brunette, cosmetic undoing takes a lot more work—and time, and money, and pain tolerance.

Even so, patients are following in the footsteps of pioneers like Victoria Beckham (who had her breast implants removed) and Kylie Jenner and Courteney Cox (both of whom have spoken openly about having dermal filler dissolved). They may be hoping that an excavation will reveal their original bone structure—or at least lips that don't look like they're in the throes of anaphylactic shock.

Muneeb Shah, DO, a board-certified dermatologist with nearly 18 million followers on TikTok as DermDoctor, fields these kinds of questions all the time. Filler, he says, is the most common cosmetic treatment he sees getting reversed—though simply dissolving it won't get the job done. "Once you have all that volume in your skin, when you take it away, it's like a deflated balloon. You're getting more crepiness and sagging, more wrinkly," he says. He advises his deflating clients to try radiofrequency microneedling, such as Morpheus8, to tighten their skin.

"We have patients who had years and years of fillers," says Melissa Doft, MD, who runs the kind of low-key Park Avenue office that's a magnet for wealthy moms clad head to toe in The Row. One patient wanted her filler dissolved because she missed her natural bone structure—only to be horrified when she could see how much she'd aged. So she requested a very subtle facelift, the sort of procedure some younger women plan ahead for—to the extent that they're skipping filler so it won't interfere with their future nip and tuck.

As women seek smaller lips, they're also seeking daintier breast implants. Or removing the implants altogether, sometimes adding a breast lift and some fat grafting from the stomach, thighs, or flanks to create a subtly natural shape.

"Big breasts might have looked sexy at a certain time in your life, but you get older and it makes you look chubby and matronly," says Doft. And don't downplay the effects of mass semaglutide usage, either. Using it gives devotees a hollowed-out so-called Ozempic face—and the combination of implants and rapid weight loss, Doft says, makes women look "like boobs on a stick."

Few procedures are harder to reverse than a buttock augmentation. Trying to undo a Brazilian butt lift (or BBL) by sucking it out of the body carries the risk for nerve damage, asymmetry, and skin laxity. Last year Anastasia "Stas" Karanikolaou, a friend of Jenner's, documented the arduous process of getting hers reversed. She said on her debut podcast that her BBL is "something that I regret and that I've been actively trying to fix for so long...I literally have another surgery, like, in a few weeks to try and reduce the size of it even more."

The easiest way to avoid having to undo cosmetic procedures, of course, is not to get them in the first place. Or at least to think very carefully before tapping the AmEx to pay for lip filler. In other words: Caveat injector.

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