What happens when a plastic surgery trend dies?

Kylie Jenner

Pre-social media, designers focused on two heavy-hitting collections per year and magazines fed the fashion-hungry with trend reports in monthly installments. Now, your feed serves up style inspiration multiple times a day — and it's influencing more than the shade of lipstick you buy or the shoe trend you try. More and more women (and men) are choosing to alter their physical features in ways both temporary and permanent, based on the latest Instagram look.

In fact, of all the previously unfathomable realities that the social media platform has given the world — the possibility of a career as an influencer, laxative teas with more celebrity clout than the latest It Bag — perhaps the most far-reaching is "Instagram face." You know, the homogenous mix of trendy facial features and/or body parts that make for the perfect storm of #selfie likability. Think Blake Lively's nose mixed with Kylie Jenner's lips and Emily Ratajkowski's breasts.

"Patients will come in requesting certain enhancements, especially lips, based on what they see on Instagram," Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank, a celebrity cosmetic dermatologist and founder of the PFrankMD Skin Salons, tells Fashionista. "It does create a certain frenzy in the pursuit of perfection that is not realistic." Not to mention, subject to change. What happens when today's trend becomes tomorrow's #TBT? When Jenner stops getting lip injections, or Lady Gaga's gorgeous nose becomes the ideal du jour?

This isn't necessarily a new question — beauty standards have been evolving since the beginning of time, albeit at a slower pace, and celebrities have always been a source of body modification inspiration. In the '90s, Pamela Anderson's oversize breast implants buoyed the big-boob movement, and it's only in the past handful of years that smaller breasts have fallen into fashion.

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