The $100,000 face: inside the AI-driven plastic surgery boom

Every week across the US, plastic surgeons are seeing increasing numbers of patients with a dream of a face that can’t be achieved.

They walk into the office holding an AI image in their hand, and plead, “Can you make me look more like her?”

If you’ve seen AI faces, you know exactly what this means. All of the AI models have this generic, Instagram-like face that will blend together in groups. Which isn’t terribly surprising because the software is farming Instagram models and their actual profile pictures (which hasn’t been without controversy).

Dr. Nugent, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, says they try to manage expectations because they don’t have the luxury of managing every pixel the way software does. AI programs are known to produce hyper-symmetry in faces, which is simply unrealistic in surgery, which is as much art as it is science.

But these expectations have always been a challenge. Since the profession’s inception, patients have walked in, stretched their faces taut with their hands, and asked the surgeon for that look. Which makes the entire practice look easier than it is.

In prior decades, it was quite common for patients to walk into an office, clutching ripped-out pages from Vogue, with pictures of Gisele Bündchen or Claudia Schiffer, and ask the doctor to make them look like those models, as if the surgeon could easily push a button, wave the scalpel like a wand, and make it so.

This eventually evolved into Snapchat dysmorphia, with 72% of patients reporting they wanted plastic surgery just to look better in selfies, and to better live up to the heavily filtered versions of themselves they were presenting online.

The insidious thing about these AI-modified versions of yourself—is that it makes these changes feel so attainable.

With AI-powered programs like FaceApp, you can easily tweak basic features such as your eyes, nose and mouth, and those seemingly small tweaks in position and size can actually have an outsized effect on your overall appearance. A shift of a few millimeters can make you look like an entirely different person.