“Preventative facelifts are in and fillers are out,” said certified dermatologist Shereene Idriss in a December 2024 TikTok video. “I’m seeing this all over social media.” She followed with a warning: if you’re in your 20s and 30s, you do not need a facelift. However, the push towards “preventative” plastic surgery is already underway. 24-year-old TikTok creators are posting their facelift results, plastic surgeons are stressing that it’s “better to start sooner than later” and cosmetic surgery clinics are marketing early intervention facelifts as a way to be “proactive”. “Instead of waiting for the ageing process to begin and attempting to make yourself look younger again, you can actually be proactive about your ageing experience,” Dr Kevin Sadati, a plastic surgeon in Newport Beach, said on his clinic’s website. “The preventative facelift is designed to delay the ageing process.” But, if the point of a facelift is to lift skin that has lost elasticity, is the highly invasive procedure ever truly “preventative”? Does it “work” on younger skin or is this all just a predatory marketing ploy? One that is exploitative and unethical.

The premise that you can “prevent” ageing before it even begins is the marketing the entire anti-ageing industry is built on. It’s how beauty brands can sell lifting creams to young people, and injectors have convinced people to inject Botox into a face without wrinkles (“yet”!). But, in recent years, the preventative discourse has become younger and more extreme. No one is safe: 30-something-year-old celebrities are undergoing “undetectable” facial transformations, facelifts are now being marketed to 20-year-olds and tweens are fighting over Drunk Elephant retinol in Sephora. As in the case of “baby Botox”, reeling a customer into the preventative mindset (trap) is a surefire way to secure a customer for life, forever treating “issues” that have not (and may never) form – and the anti-ageing industry knows this. 

Beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino says a big starting point for the preventative ageing category was the backlash against the word “anti-ageing” almost ten years ago. Allure magazine vowed not to use the term in 2017. “That really struck a chord with the industry,” says DeFino. “Not in a way that caused anyone actually to evaluate what we mean when we say it, but instead inspiring an obsession with language.” Now, we have terms like “pro-ageing”, “ageing gracefully” and “preventative ageing”, which DeFino says all mean the same nonsensical thing. “Inherent to preventative ageing is the idea that, if you do enough when you’re young, you won’t even have to age, so you don’t have to be anti-ageing,” she says.

Inherent to preventative ageing is the idea that, if you do enough when you’re young, you won’t even have to age, so you don’t have to be anti-ageing – Jessica DeFino

Dr Melissa Doft, a double board-certified plastic surgeon in New York, says she’s recently had more 30-year-old customers asking for facelifts. “Young people are afraid of fillers,” she says. “They’re saying, ‘Why would I want fillers? I’ll just get a facelift’”. After combining a new-found fear of looking “overfilled” with the extreme weight loss achieved through new GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Dr Doft says younger patients are becoming more inclined to go under the knife. This, however, by no way means they’re bypassing the need for a future facelift. “The person who’s going to want a facelift at 30 is not going to want to see the signs of ageing at all,” she says. “They’re probably, just because of their personality, going to be more likely to get it again in eight, ten or 15 years.”

Even plastic surgeons who are usually proponents of early rejuvenation work, like Dr Catherine Chang, founder of Prive Beverly Hills and Naked Beauty MD, are concerned that a facelift at 20 is far too young. “At the end of the day, you and your skin are going to age, even with a facelift at a younger age,” says Dr Chang. “Getting a facelift can turn back the clock, but it cannot stop the clock.” More invasive procedures in general, however, are starting to appeal to people who have grown tired of the continuous cost and upkeep of injectables. “I think that people are getting more educated on rejuvenation procedures and surgeries as opposed to camouflaging with filler, and I feel we’re going to continue to see a decline in filler,” says Dr Chang. 

If a facelift can now be “preventative”, it changes the game for what other typically ageing surgical procedures some young people will begin to explore. Dr Chang sees younger contouring procedures, like chin implants, direct fat excision and blepharoplasties, on the near horizon. Unfortunately, the target of how to look “young” and on trend will also continue to shift. Just think of filler: bigger lips and cheekbones were first marketed as a way to keep up a youthful appearance, only for the aesthetic of filler to be considered ageing by popular culture only years later. Or buccal fat removal: the procedure went viral in 2022 as a way to look Bella Hadid snatched, but it was labelled as ageing shortly after and now people are being encouraged to graft the fat back onto their faces.

Beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino says the preventive cycle never ends because our current concept of ageing is less attached to age than it is attached to norms. “The over-plumped look was a norm and indicated something about the era you’re born into,” she says. “Now, with what we’re calling the ‘undetectable era”, this ‘undetectable facelift‘ will be a marker in time – tightly lifted and irreversible.” With this in mind, your face could be “lifted into oblivion”, as DeFino puts it, but kids in ten years may still say you look old because it’s clear you had the procedure done when it was trendy. It’s a cruel dance: forever chasing the ever-changing aesthetic of youthfulness. 

Now, with what we’re calling the ‘undetectable era‘, this ‘undetectable facelift‘ will be a marker in time – tightly lifted and irreversible – Jessica DeFino

There’s no such thing as a “preventative” facelift, just like there’s no real way to know how your face would have aged without your anti-ageing creams or baby Botox. Ultimately, the “ageing” we may be running from may just be the simple act of looking like a living, breathing person in real life. “I think a lot of what we’re seeing with beauty standards today and surgeries is not so much a fear of ageing as an urge to stay the same as in an image,” says DeFino. “We’re so attached to these frozen images of ourselves that we want our physical bodies to match.” The only way to do that is to become 2D or freeze time – both of which aren’t physically possible. “That’s how a picture works, but it’s not how a body works,” DeFino adds.