The trend looked, at first, like good news.
Across social media, women have been documenting the reversal of their cosmetic procedures — explanting breast implants, dissolving filler, walking back surgeries they once saved up for. Clinics, sensing the shift, are now advertising 'buccal fat restoration,' a procedure designed to undo the very fat-removal treatment that was, until recently, considered aspirational. Capitalism, as ever, follows the signal.
When The Free Press asked columnist Freya India to write about the trend, the expectation was a story about women arriving, finally, at self-acceptance. India had published a book earlier this year arguing that social media had convinced a generation of girls they needed to inject their faces with toxins simply to look acceptable — and had called on women to push back.
What she found instead was something considerably more troubling.
The women India spoke with, or observed online, had often endured serious harm. One described blood and pus 'actually pouring out of a hole in my ass' after receiving butt filler. Another recalled a 'nightmare' appointment for chin filler. A 29-year-old told India that after getting Botox, her face swelled so severely she could barely see, leaving her 'angry,' 'scared,' and 'extremely insecure.' That same woman said she remained 'interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer.'
The reversal, in other words, was not a rejection. It was a pause.
India also noted that women who had suffered real physical consequences were nonetheless careful to avoid any judgment of the broader practice. 'I'm not here to judge,' was a common refrain. One TikToker who experienced digestive issues and breathing problems after breast implants still offered the standard disclaimer: 'I think everybody is obviously entitled to do what they want with their bodies.'
Separately, last week an NYPD officer died in the Dominican Republic after suffering complications from her removal.
'I met many young women brave enough to risk it all for beauty,' India writes, 'but not one brave enough to say this to others: Don't do it.'
Also in this weekend's edition: Rafaela Siewert sits down with Egor Cherniuk, a 28-year-old Brooklyn DJ who once worked for Alexei Navalny and says he is now on Vladimir Putin's most-wanted list. In exile, Cherniuk finds himself politically homeless in a different way. 'To bicker about pronouns when you don't have a free press or when you don't even have independent courts sounds so fucking ridiculous,' he tells Siewert. Kat Rosenfield makes the case for Rob Reiner's Stand by Me — which turns 40 this month — as a document of a childhood that no longer exists, at a moment when, according to one poll, a majority of 14-year-olds in America are not permitted to go further than their own street without adult supervision. And Amanda Knox writes about a criminologist who coerced a chatbot into a false confession, drawing a direct line to her own interrogation nearly 20 years ago in an Italian police station.
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The plastic surgery story is, at its core, a story about incentives — and about what happens when no institution, no voice of authority, and no cultural norm is willing to say that a thing is simply bad. The market will sell the procedure and then sell the reversal. Influencers will document the harm and then hedge every conclusion into meaninglessness. What is missing, as India plainly identifies, is the willingness to make a judgment. Not a law, not a ban — a judgment. The reluctance to offer one, dressed up as bodily autonomy, is its own kind of cowardice. The record of harm is public. Someone should say so.
