More People Are Considering Cosmetic Procedures After a Year of Only Being Seen Through Their Webcams

During the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, plastic surgeons noted a surge of patients requesting facial procedures, a beauty trend that one surgeon called “a kind of Zoom effect.” After all, it’s practically impossible not to find anything about your face that you’d like to tweak after staring at yourself on Zoom for several hours a day, five days a week, for an entire year. As a freelancer, I’m lucky enough not to have to sit through video calls too often (knock on wood), but I still wasn’t immune—the dark circles caused by the stress of the past year still had me considering under-eye fillers more seriously than ever before.

But as thousands of people in the U.S. get vaccinated every day, many of those who have been sitting in front of their computer screens since last March are preparing to resume activities such as “going into the office” and “kissing people they don’t live with”—and that, perhaps in combination with the societal obsession over pandemic weight gain, has reportedly led to a renewed interest in body procedures such as tummy tucks and liposuction. In fact, in a recent survey, one in ten women said that they were more interested in cosmetic plastic surgery or non-surgical cosmetic procedures now than they were before the pandemic. Of the respondents who had already had a cosmetic procedure in the past, almost 25% said they were interested in getting additional work done.

I completely understand wanting to reemerge into the outside world as your hottest self, but contrary to fatphobic popular belief, hottest doesn’t actually have to mean thinnest!

Even with the effects of “Zoom face” leading people to fixate on their crow’s feet, Business of Fashion reports that cosmetic surgeries were down by 14% in 2020 compared to 2019. Two of the only procedures that saw an increase in 2020 were buttock implants and pectoral implants—because even in a global health crisis, there’s still time to get thick/swole.