Inside The Plastic Surgery Boom That Took Quarantine By Storm

When it comes to cosmetic work, the pandemic is compelling many to ask themselves, “If not now, when?”

A couple of weeks into quarantine, Carey, a 42-year-old New Jersey mother of three, decided she wanted to lose the extra 15 pounds she’d been carrying since her youngest child was born in 2017. “Experts were saying that diabetes, which runs in my family and being overweight were risk factors for contracting COVID-19. I [thought], ‘I need to be healthier. Why not use this time to work on myself?’ ” Through exercise, she shed the weight in three months, but she still had skin hanging over her C-section scar that bothered her. No matter how many virtual Pilates classes she took, however, “I knew my tummy was never going to look the way I wanted it to.” So when her surgeon’s office reopened, she decided to get a tummy tuck.

Sarah,* 36, a fashion entrepreneur in New York, also opted to get plastic surgery during the quarantine. After stabilizing her businesses financially at the beginning of lockdown, she felt she “deserved a reward.” For Sarah, that meant finally getting a blepharoplasty to remove the excess skin from her lid—something she’d been wanting to do for six years.

If you wore a mask a year ago in Beverly Hills, people would have assumed you just had a facelift.

On the surface, these sound like average plastic surgery stories: A feature or body part has bothered someone for years, so they decide to change it. The twist is that, for a variety of reasons, women are increasingly reaching that go-for-it moment now—in the middle of a global pandemic, when most people had predicted such treatments would fall by the wayside. The major plastic surgery associations have yet to gather final stats for 2020, but Lisa Cassileth, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Los Angeles, reports that her surgical colleagues are busier than ever. “There’s this mentality of ‘I’m just going to do it. I’ve waited this long,’ ” she says. “I’ve never seen this before.”