What’s Behind the Plastic Surgery Surge?

To say that Jeremy Warner, MD, FACS, has seen an uptick in demand for cosmetic surgery in recent years is a bit of an understatement. “Throughout the pandemic, I’ve easily seen a 50% increase,” says Dr. Warner, a double board-certified plastic surgeon and owner of the Warner Institute in Winnetka, Ill. He’s not alone. Plastic surgeons everywhere are enjoying a healthy boost in business. While there’s no doubt the pandemic and remote-work-driven demand have played major roles in the industry’s growth, it’s a dangerous oversimplification to solely credit COVID-19 for the increase in cosmetic-based procedures. Understanding the intricacies of the current plastic surgery landscape — as well as the multilayered reasons for growth — is paramount to capitalizing on this surging service line.

The sudden and significant increase in the number of Americans who transitioned to working remotely during the pandemic has contributed greatly to the increased demand for cosmetic procedures. Remote workers, fixated on their faces during an endless string of virtual meetings, gave birth to plastic surgery’s “Zoom Boom” by scheduling procedures to correct perceived flaws.

“Everyone is looking at themselves during calls and thinking, ‘Oh my, I look so bad. I need to do something about it,’” says Hisham Seify, MD, PhD, FACS, a board-certified plastic surgeon and associate clinical professor of plastic surgery at UCLA.

COVID-19 caused prospective patients to consider plastic surgery for the first time and played a significant role in how they’ve been able to afford lifts, tucks and injections. During the worst months of the pandemic, people didn’t have a lot of options to spend their disposable income and during the brief elective surgery shutdown they couldn’t get work done on themselves. As a result, when the shutdown ended, patients began scheduling procedures in droves. “When we opened back up, there was a boom in demand,” says Dr. Seify. “Patients had a lot of money in their pocket because they didn’t travel or spend it on the other things they usually did.”

While these factors might explain the sudden increase in cosmetic cases, the procedures had been trending upward long before COVID-19. “We’re at an inflection point,” says Dr. Warner. “More patients want to have cosmetic procedures done to improve their lives and feel good about themselves during an era when those procedures are less taboo and in a field where advancements in medicine and technology are making the procedures less invasive, less risky and not as big of a deal as they used to be.”

Surgical leaders and facilities with big ideas about jumping on the plastic surgery bandwagon and enjoying great success should pump the brakes and temper their expectations. A successful plastics practice takes at least a decade to build, according to Dr. Seify, who works at a surgery center that does mainly reconstructive plastic surgeries and a private practice that focuses on cosmetic procedures. While traditional marketing is certainly a crucial component of the plastics industry, it’s the word-of-mouth buzz that you’re after — and that type of cachet takes time to build.

We’re at an inflection point. More patients want to have cosmetic procedures done to improve their lives and feel good about themselves.
— Jeremy Warner, MD, FACS

When case volume fluctuates, which it almost certainly will, a bloated marketing budget can be disastrous. Dr. Seify, who gets 85% of his business from referrals of satisfied patients, offers a cautionary tale of a practice that specialized in facelifts to illustrate this point. “They were spending around $1 million a month on marketing alone, and when things got slow, they literally shut down overnight,” he says. “Employees showed up for work in the morning, and the place was closed.”

To prevent a similar fate, Dr. Seify offers one simple but critical piece of advice: Set realistic expectations with your patients from the start. “I tell my patients exactly how they’ll look after surgery,” he says. “If that’s going to make them happier, I tell them to proceed. If it won’t, I tell them I’m not the one to fix their problem.”

He also relies on a thorough, multitiered patient selection process that starts with a nurse actively looking for red flags of discontent — blatantly mean or aggressive patients, unrealistic expectations — during the initial pre-op visit because unsatisfied patients can cripple a plastic surgery facility’s reputation. “Some patients expect to walk away from surgery without scars, swelling or bruising,” he says. “That’s impossible.”

Regardless of the patient selection process, surgeons must perform successful procedures. That’s ultimately what will make or break their business, according to Dr. Warner. “You have to be able to provide good, consistent, long-term outcomes,” he says. “You’re not going to have too many patients showing up to get work done if your poor results are walking around in the community.” OSM