A Beverly Hills plastic surgeon is opening up about the cosmetic procedures she wouldn’t undergo.
Dr. Kelly Killeen, who has been featured on the TV show “Dr. 90210,” reveals the top five elective surgeries to avoid in a viral TikTok video.
“So No. 1 is low-hanging fruit. You probably all guessed it, it’s a Brazilian butt lift,” Killeen said.
She noted that the popular procedure — there were some 40,000 buttock augmentations performed in the US in 2020 alone — has the “highest death and complication rate of any elective cosmetic procedure.”
“I don’t like the weird, skeevy ‘hero worship’ culture of the surgeons that perform a lot of this surgery,” Killeen continued. “I think it has a weird ick factor for me. I would never, ever do it.”
The death rate from Brazilian butt lifts — where surgeons use fat from other parts of the body to change the size and shape of the derriere — is about 1 in 15,000, according to a 2020 study published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal.
Killeen declared she would also not get an upper lip lift. “We all get it, we want a bigger upper lip, but the scar’s not worth it for me,” she reasoned about the procedure, which involves removing skin between the nose and the top lip.
“I can see it in every single patient, even the ones that claim their scars aren’t seen. I can see it, I don’t like it. Everybody knows what you’ve had done. Not for me.”
She also shared that she doesn’t like how the procedure can “rotate the wet part of the red lip out and cause kind of permanent weird texture and scaling of the upper lip.”
Killeen also advises against the in vogue fox eye thread lift, noting that it’s a “trend that’s probably going to be out in a few years.”
In the procedure, the skin near the outer corner of the eye is pulled back towards the temple with biodegradable sutures.
“Learn how to make your eyebrow do that thing on its own by shaving the end. Work on your eye makeup techniques,” she suggested.
Fat transfer breast augmentation is another procedure Killeen says she has performed, but would not undergo herself.
“I know I do a lot of fat grafting to the breast, but if you need that much fat in your breast to do what you want to do, you’re just at a higher risk for complications like cysts and fat necrosis, contour deformities where you’ve been lipo-ed all over,” Killeen explained.
“Fat just doesn’t have the structure of an implant or breast tissue, so you end up with kind of a dumpier-looking breast, and I just would never do that.”
Rhinoplasty is also on Killeen’s no-no list because it can be accompanied by “a year of swelling and … unpredictable scarring.”
To round out her list, Killeen also recommended avoiding thread lifts, which involve placing medical-grade thread under the skin to pull it into position.
“Not surgery, but a procedure I would never have — a thread lift on anywhere,” she proclaimed.
“They look OK when you’re static. When you’re in motion, you can see the pull of the threads. There’s all kinds of weird complications from infections to extrusions where they come through your skin.”
Plastic surgery has become increasingly popular in recent years — with Gen Z booking more cosmetic surgeries than ever.
In fact, 75% of plastic surgeons reported seeing a spike in clients under 30, according to data released last month by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, which is a “consistently higher plateau over the five previous years.”
This comes as body dysmorphia — worrying about flaws in your appearance — has also been on the rise in recent years.
A disturbing study released in 2020 found an increase in feelings of dysmorphia brought on by staring at your own face through the lens of a computer camera all day, which experts dubbed “Zoom Dysmorphia.”
Social media and face filters — like TikTok’s new “Bold Glamour” filter — have also been linked to these trends.
“There’s an issue with losing perspective on what you actually look like, and it’s not something we talk about much,” Renee Engeln, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and author of “Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession With Appearance Hurts Girls and Women,” told HuffPost in 2018.
“It’s not enough [to] have to compare yourself to these perfected images of models, but now you’ve got this daily comparison of your real self to this intentional or unintentional fake self that you present on social media. It’s just one more way to feel like you’re falling short every day,” Engeln added.