Plastic surgeons see rise in AI-generated beauty requests

A 60-year-old woman sat across from Dr Sachin Shridharani's desk and showed him an image. It wasn't a photo of a celebrity or an influencer it was an AI-generated version of herself. Flawless skin, sharp jaw, ageless features.

"She wanted to look like her granddaughter, forty years younger," Shridharani, a Manhattan plastic surgeon, recalled. The gap between what the AI promised and what surgery could deliver was enormous.

Patients are walking into cosmetic surgeons offices with AI generated pictures from ChatGPT, specialised apps, and AI filters asking the doctor to recreate these impossible versions of themselves, you know, like a shortcut that got out of hand or something.

Dr Rachel Westbay, a cosmetic dermatologist on the Upper East Side, in an interview with Business Insider said one patient’s AI image was a “caricature”: cartoonish lips, enlarged doll-like eyes. It’s like saying “I want to look like Ariel from The Little Mermaid” she said, as if that’s a direct, simple request.

Then there’s a 2024 survey from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where they found that people who used AI image enhancers had “significantly higher” expectations for plastic surgery results than patients who didn’t.

AI image generators tend to produce what doctors call the "Bratz doll" aesthetic: plumped lips, oversized eyes, defined jawlines. The technology doesn't account for individual facial structure, ethnicity, or surgical balance.

"There is no procedure I can do to enlarge eye size," Westbay explained. "Even if we could make it happen, it would have people looking at you like a cartoon." Complex procedures like rhinoplasties are especially problematic. AI struggles with the three-dimensional intricacy of nose reshaping, often producing results that are surgically impossible.

Dr Steven Williams, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, has seen patients arrive with AI visions of breast augmentations, body contouring, and facelifts. His assessment: "Pixels are easier than surgery." The constraint isn't imagination it's physics, anatomy, and safety.

This isn't the first time patients have brought reference images to surgery consultations. Years ago, Vogue cutouts were common. A 2019 study by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found 72% of surgeons had patients requesting procedures to improve selfies a phenomenon termed "Snapchat dysmorphia."