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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Selfie-love: report suggests filtered selfies directly linked to spike in body dysmorphia

Highsnobiety online magazine has suggested that young people are having surgery to look like the filtered selfie version of themselves. 

In a new article from the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “Selfies-Living in the Era of Filtered Photographs,” the report focuses on “Snapchat dysmorphia,” a type of body dysmorphia, a condition with excessive preoccupation with a perceived flaw in appearance, classified on the obsessive-compulsive spectrum.

According to the article, a recent study analyzed the effect of edited selfies on body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls and found that those who tweaked their photos much more using social media apps like Snapchat and Facetune, reported a higher level of concern with their bodies, and an overestimation of body shape and weight. The study also explains “that those with a dysmorphic body image may seek out social media as a means of validating their attractiveness.”

Dr. Neelam Vashi, director of the Boston University Center for Ethnic Skin, and one of the authors of the JAMA piece, said that the new phenomenon, dubbed “Snapchat dysmorphia,” has patients seeking out cosmetic surgery to look like filtered versions of themselves with fuller lips, bigger eyes, or a thinner nose. It has become an alarming trend because those filtered selfies “are blurring the line of reality and fantasy for these patients.”

The report also suggests that filtered selfies can have harmful effects on adolescents or those with BDD because these groups may more severely internalize this beauty standard.

For more, read the full story on the Journal of the American Medical Association.