Don't you just feel like lately a lot of people look the same?
Want to know why?
It's filler.
The cartoonishly huge lips, the suspiciously plump cheeks …
Filler made it all possible.
The UK has gone mad for filler.
Our cosmetic surgery industry is worth £3.6bn.
Much of this money is being spent on dermal fillers,
gels that are injected into your face to add volume to lips and cheeks.
There's less of a stigma about getting work done, everyone's getting injected.
But have we reached peak filler?
One person more than anyone else kick-started our love affair with fillers:
American cosmetics mogul and social media superstar, Kylie Jenner.
In 2015, Jenner ended speculation by admitting she’d had her lips done.
Jenner ended speculation by admitting she'd had her lips done.
'I have temporary lip fillers.'
'It's just an insecurity of mine and it's what I wanted to do.'
Reality TV stars like Holly Hagan, Charlotte Crosby and the stars of Love Island
followed suit.
It's not just lips that are getting bigger,
women are using filler to sculpt their jaw lines, their cheeks and even their bums
but fans of filler may not realise the wider implications of this trend.
Some people feel like the filler look appropriates and fetishises black bodies.
Using lip fillers can be problematic because sometimes in society people attribute
beauty when one group does it but it's considered unattractive when another group does it.
For example, it hasn't always been fashionable to have big lips or big hips.
Now it seems that it is a trend particularly if it's on a white woman.
But if a black person is born with big lips naturally that person may be looked down on
versus a white woman who gets lip fillers.
It's considered beautiful and attractive and may even be able to have a whole career based on her looks
and her fuller lips.
Where celebrities went, everyday women followed.
'I really want a slightly fuller plumper here …'
'… enhance my features a little bit .'
'Everyone gets filler and Botox nowadays.'
'I have my lips done and that is it.'
To many young people filler isn't a big deal.
A 2019 poll from VICE,
found that 59% of young people viewed filler as the equivalent of getting a haircut or a manicure.
You can get a face full of filler at your local beauty salon for a few hundred quid
and it's easy to find a package on Instagram
which is how many filler providers market themselves.
Fancy looking like Kylie Jenner? There's a package for that.
If injected by an accredited practitioner filler is usually safe.
These are medical treatments so there's always going to be potential medical outburst risks
but with a medical trained practitioner, in a safe environment, you minimise these risks
and also in the event that they do go wrong, you know you in the hands of someone that has a
medical training and can act independently and prescribe
independently to treat those adverse outcomes.
But if the person who is injecting you doesn't know what they're doing,
it's easy for filler to go wrong.
'They've blocked an artery,
the blood isn't getting to the top of my lip so the whole of this side
isn't really getting much pulse which is probably the reason why it's so bruised and purple.'
'God, I really can't breathe with anxiety.'
The biggest thing that we worry about when we inject fillers
is something called tissue necrosis
where if we inject a product and it ends up blocking the blood supply to tissue,
that area of tissue is starved of oxygen and nutrients and dies.
If that area of tissue is going towards the eye, It can result in blindness,
and if it's going to cause a brain, in some cases, stroke.
So it's quite serious when it comes to inject a filler.
Astonishingly, you don’t need to have a licence or any qualifications to administer filler,
anyone can order filler over the internet, pick up a needle, and start injecting.
And, there’s no legal age limit for getting fillers whatsoever.
Of the thousand complaints that we had last year, 48% of those girls were aged between 18 and 24.
And they do tend to be the age group that are perhaps not cash rich
and they seek out the cheapest treatments
and because they take to social media to find their practitioner,
they take validation and trust in how many followers these people have got,
how many before and after pictures and sort of how celebrity driven their pages kept to be.
'So don't just go to anybody for this, you gotta go to the best.'
'I wanted to show you my Botox.'
'Always good to see you.'
Just because somebody is savvy on social media,
is no indication of how skilled of an injector they are.
In the USA only around 10 different types of filler are approved for use due to
tighter FDA regulations.
In Europe around 160 different types of filler are currently permitted.
Many of these fillers will only have been tested on a
very limited number of people.
So what's the answer?
Many believe the government needs to step in and regulate the industry.
Everybody's absolute ideal would be for the government to stipulate that
actually these treatments are only safe in the hands of medical practitioners
which is what we believe as a government approved register.
There are some signs that change may be forthcoming.
In Ireland, the government is considering banning fillers for under-18s.
In the UK, the British government has no current plans to regulate the industry.
However, a parliamentary group has announced that it will be launching an inquiry into unregulated fillers.
Whether or not the government steps in, one thing looks certain:
our filler addiction isn’t going away any time soon.
Before I started researching this, I did not think fillers were such a big deal.
Now I know that they are and if you're going to get them you should think about them carefully.
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