Your social media feed could be bad for your health.
Photos on Instagram FB, +2.75% Snapchat SNAP, +2.58% and other platforms are fueling a rise in mental health disorders, skewing users’ self-perception and inspiring them to seek out plastic surgery procedures, a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Thursday said.
Photo editing apps and social media have caused people to compare themselves to unrealistic beauty standards, and can even lead to body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), it said. BDD is classified as a form of obsessive compulsive disorder in which a person becomes excessively preoccupied with a perceived flaw in appearance.
People are seeking changes to very small perceived flaws after spending too much time on social media, said Lara Devgan, the chief medical officer at plastic-surgery platform RealSelf.
“I’ve noticed an uptick in people looking for what I like to call micro-optimization — tiny, millimeter-level changes that together make the face look better,” she said. Examples include requests for slightly fuller lips or narrower noses. “This is the principle behind Snapchat filters, and it has become the new norm with aesthetic medicine and plastic surgery.”
Many patients don’t realize the images they constantly see on social media are airbrushed, the paper said. Meanwhile, cosmetic surgery jumped 11% in 2017, with consumers spending more than $6.5 billion on procedures that year alone, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, a trade group.
Also see: Does it pay to airbrush your photos to perfection?
The number of cosmetic procedures of all kinds has increased 115% since 2000, which many surgeons attribute to the rise of social media. The majority of plastic surgeons (66%) say that patients request procedures such as lip fillers based on posts by social media stars like Kylie Jenner.
More than 40% of surgeons in a recent American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery survey said looking better in selfies on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook FB, +2.75% was an incentive for patients getting surgery.
Doctor Michael Byun, a cosmetic surgeon in Chicago, said he has seen an increase in teens coming in for lip procedures citing photos of Kylie Jenner as inspiration. He struggles to balance their wishes with what is best for the patient.
“Patients are the most important person in the equation,” he said. “But I should be protective of my patient and be an advocate. We surgeons should do procedures benefiting their physiology as well as their psychology.”
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Before Instagram and Facebook, patients would bring images of celebrities to their surgeons. But now, in a phenomenon dubbed “Snapchat dysmorphia,” patients bring in edited versions of their own faces created with the retouching app Facetune or Instagram or Snapchat filters, showing fuller lips, bigger eyes, and a thinner nose, the researchers said. (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Facetune did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
“This is an alarming trend because those filtered selfies often present an unattainable look and are blurring the line of reality and fantasy for these patients,” the authors of the JAMA article wrote. The paper was co-authored by four doctors at the Boston University School of Medicine based on their experiences.
The trend isn’t just limited to women: Men accounted for 8% of those who got plastic surgery in 2017, up 1% from 2016. Men received contouring procedures such as liposuction (up 23%), tummy tucks (up 12%) and male breast reductions (up 30%) over the past year.
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