Selfies, Social Media and Plastic Surgery: A New Phenomenon

Could too many selfies be saying something about insecurity? Whatever your selfie means to you, statistics show it means booming business for the plastic surgery scene.

A new survey found that the increasing number of plastic surgery procedures performed in the United States significantly explain the selfie phenomenon, where people share numerous photos of themselves .

The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive surgery polled 2,700 of its members to find that about 1 in 3 reported an uptick in requests for procedures by patients wanting to improve their image on social media.

In fact, survey results showed a 10 percent rise in rhinoplasty in 2013 over 2012 and a 7 percent increase in hair transplants. Furthermore, there was even a 6 percent increase in eyelid surgery during the same time period.

"Social platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and the iPhone app Selfie.im, which are solely image based, force patients to hold a microscope up to their own image and often look at it with a more self-critical eye than ever before," said AAFPRS President Edward Farrior. "Our patients want to put their best face forward."

Doctors caution the dangers of selfies. For instance, taking pictures of yourself is not a good way to determine what needs to be corrected as images can be disordered and not an accurate representation of the person's actual face.

"We all will have something wrong with us on a selfie image," said Sam Rizk, a plastic surgeon based in Manhattan who specializes in rhinoplasty, via Reuters. "I refuse a significant proportion of patients with selfies because I believe it is not a real image of what they actually look like in person."

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