I had never heard of the term “prejuvenation,” but I know there has been a trend for women- teenagers on up- to start doing plastic surgery earlier to age better. Then mix that with TikTok and a bunch of misinformation and great optimization engines and marketing and you get a big mess.
What is prejuvenation?
The thought is that young people are doing treatments to prevent sings of aging rather than to treat or fix what has happened. Prevention. They are doing topical treatments, BOTOX, dermal fillers, and energy based external devices to delay cellular senescence and delay aging. If you can’t contract a muscle? that will relax skin so wrinkles don’t form.
This was an article (yup- its reached the journal article stage already) “Prejuvenation: What the Social Media Tells Us About the Rising Trend.” This was in April 2024 Aesthetic Surgery Journal.
What did they do?
They studied the 13 most common hashtags for Prejuvenation on TikTok. They then looked at the top 25 videos for each of the hashtags. They looked at #babybotox #foreheadbotox #dysport #botoxcheck #botoxnatural #wrinkleprevention #preventativebotox #antiwrinkleinjections #xeomin #microbotox #glabellabotox #antiwrinkle. They evaluated:
- poster credentials
- videos considered educational were analyzed using validated scores on patient education materials assessment.
- the creator’s prejuvenation recommendations were recorded
- Univariate and linear regression models were used to analyze.
What did they find?
You can imagine on the wild west of the internet, there was tons of misinformation and the most popular videos were not those of credentialed doctors putting out solid information.
They found
- 303 videos with over 61 million views, 4 million likes, 25 thousand comments, and 71 thousand shares.
- Nonphysicians posted 85% of the content and had significantly higher views, likes, and engagement than physician videos
- of “educational” videos, 67% supported the use of prejuvenation treatments, 24% were neutral, ad only 8% we opposed.
- TikTok users could NOT tell the difference in the quality of doctor vs. nondoctor videos, meaning they considered the educational content of them to be equal, where the researchers in this study found a huge difference in the quality of the content when analyzed.
- There was a lot of differences in attitudes to prejuvenation, and the variability even exited in videos made by doctors as well.
My thoughts?
Egads. There is so much to unpack here. I think I need to add more information, which as a balanced board certified plastic surgeon who no one follows, I know will not be read or liked or forwarded. But in case any young people find my site, here are my basic thoughts, and PLEASE READ MY NEXT BLOG HERE.
First and foremost, know the quality of your information. Is it from a doctor? Do they seem to have integrity or are they just trying to upsell you through fear? Are they getting kickbacks? Have they even used the product? Is the information real? Is there science? True before and after photos? (is it a model photo? AI? and look at lighting- lots of doctors even will distort the befores and afters by changing position or lighting to make it look better).
Second, I do think there are some things you can do young- read my next blog on that.
Don’t do things because some person on your feed tells you to. Botox rates for those under 30 yo has risen by 50%. There is a projection that younger adults will make up the majority of Botox users by 2025. This is because of TikTok, not science.
As for real science, there was one study showing Botox lasted longer and was more efficacious in keeping away wrinkles for women ages 18-40. What did it not study or state? It did NOT show that doing this would prevent sings of aging that occur naturally. So it did NOT prove that if you start at age 18, you will look better at 40. Botox is not cheap. Is that where you should spend your money?
There are “few scientific studies showing facial injectables prevent wrinkles”. I have not seen any, and I blog a lot. Social media and influencers have created a crazy perception of filler as being “preventative”
TikTok is a huge information source, particularly for younger people, and TIkTok as an information source is seriously FLAWED. This study shows clearly the most listened to videos and voices are NOT QUALIFIED to be giving this information, and they are giving out MISinformation.