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Plastic surgeons used to lament that you never got to see their best work. For years the billboards for their profession were the train wrecks: nose jobs that rendered patients unrecognizable, face-lifts that doubled as wind tunnel simulations, cheeks stretched like taffy, eyes in a permanent state of surprise.
People have been happily getting discreet nips and tucks by expert surgeons for ages; it’s just that none of them were willing to announce it to the world. That is, until July 21 of 2021, when Marc Jacobs posted a photo on Instagram captioned “Yesterday.” In it, the 58-year-old fashion designer is in full post-procedural wrap, complete with drainage tubes and what looks like 86 layers of gauze. The accompanying tag names Park Avenue plastic surgeon Andrew Jacono and includes the hashtags #f*ckgravity and #lifelovelift.
The responses, far from being ridiculing and judgmental, were overwhelmingly positive. “Always lifting our spirits Marc,” wrote fellow designer Christian Cowan. “When is the unveiling???” asked model Kristen McMenamy.
By showing himself after surgery—and notably not in the all-healed-and-looking-curiously-refreshed phase—Jacobs high-jumped over hiding out and went straight to celebrating. The admission felt revelatory. “Not only did I do this,” he seemed to be saying, “but I couldn’t be happier about it.” As he said a week later, “There is no shame in being vain.”
The dinner party whisper has been replaced by the in-progress Instastory. We share our diets (from Sakara meals to the new shelf-stable lifestyle reset Kroma), exercise routines, and even injections and extreme facials. Housewives and Kardashians must be given credit for taking cameras with them to the dermatologist, but it’s not just reality stars or paid ambassadors who are opening up. Veronica Webb treated her melasma with dermatologist Michelle Henry; Amy Schumer posted a video of her freezing fat under her chin with CoolMini at the office of dermatologist Amy Wechsler and physician assistant Laura Dyer.
Yet plastic surgery is the final frontier of living out loud on social media. “People aren’t perfect and ageless. There’s no reason to misrepresent the truth anymore, because everyone’s doing it,” says Jacono, who was as shocked as everyone else to see Jacobs’s post (and follow-ups). “Marc being so transparent and saying, ‘Hey, this is okay,’ means something to people. Celebrities who say they just use olive oil? It makes the rest of us feel like crap. We wonder, Why is it that when I smear the olive oil on my face I don’t look 20 years younger?”
There’s no reason to misrepresent the truth anymore, because everyone’s doing it.
The radical honesty is appreciated, but it’s still not practiced by the majority of Jacono’s patients. Out of every 100, he says, maybe 15 agree to show their before-and-after photos on his Instagram account. Plastic surgeon Julius Few says that, surprisingly, the willingness of patients to have him post their results does not break down along generational lines. “I had a woman in her seventies who made a point of saying, ‘You can put it on Instagram,’ ” he says.
When Gwyneth Paltrow began using Xeomin to “look less pissed off,” it was her friend Few who performed the injections. (Paltrow later became a spokesperson for the company.) Her understated look was once synonymous with effortless beauty, but now, Few points out, she and Goop have opened the conversation about wellness, mental health, intimacy, and, frankly, effort, which leads to openness in every area of our lives. “You don’t mind telling people you’re going to work out at a gym,” Few says, so why not surgery? “It has allowed people to say, ‘Why should this be a taboo?’ ”
Few remembers a celebrity patient who came to his home base in Chicago to do the Oprah show several years ago. After seeing Few for eye surgery and injectables, she sat on Winfrey’s stage and attributed her fresh look to clean living and quitting smoking. That era of outright denial, he says, is over. “A celebrity might not say what they’ve done, but they’re no longer trying to pretend that they’ve never done anything.” Jacono is happy to fill in the blanks. “When you see a celebrity, and you say that they don’t age and they’re in their fifties, the reason is they’ve had plastic surgery,” he says. “They’re not mutants. Gravity pulls on all of us.”