Before Layla*, a 33-year-old in Brooklyn, went to Seoul for cosmetic surgery in 2025, she consulted ChatGPT. She didn’t speak the language or understand the menus, so she cross-referenced the procedures using AI. “There’s a comfort in having something to bounce all the racing thoughts you have about plastic surgery, when you don’t want to exhaust your friends, because it’s a life-altering decision that’s constantly on your mind,” she says. “I used Chat to see what was possible – and came out of that trip an expert in Korean plastic surgery.” 

Layla ended up getting a facial fat transfer and under-eye fat bag removal, as well as Rejuran (derived from Salmon DNA) and Re20. Beforehand, ChatGPT gave her a rundown of the recovery time for each one. Once, she even sent a photo of her face and asked, “If you could fix anything on my face, what would you fix?” Despite her best efforts, ChatGPT would always decline her attempt to visualise different procedures, but she simply found another AI program that would. “It’s really easy going into Chat spirals where you have these toxic urges when no one is watching,” she says. As AI technology continues to evolve and people continue to integrate assistants like ChatGPT and Claude into their everyday lives, how will AI shape the future of cosmetic surgery?

There’s a lot of AI doomerism out there, to the point that more and more people believe it threatens to wipe out humanity. And while it’s hard to accurately predict how a major new technological advancement will shape the world – just look at how the internet, with all its promises of connecting people across the globe, has contributed to today’s loneliness epidemic – we can reasonably assume the age of AI is the end of the world as we once knew it. Already, algorithms and technology like filters have shaped our relationship to beauty, as we’re exposed to more faces and global beauty standards become more and more homogenised. As with any other field, people in the cosmetic industry are already using AI in both helpful and more problematic ways. 

“There’s a comfort in having something to bounce all the racing thoughts you have about plastic surgery, when you don’t want to exhaust your friends... I used Chat to see what was possible – and came out of that trip an expert in Korean plastic surgery” 

In a recent British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) survey, 15 per cent of surgeons reported that they had experience of patients using AI to change their face and asking them to replicate the new image. While Layla says she found the most helpful use of AI to be creating a payment and recovery schedule, many others are showing up to the doorstep of plastic surgeons with unrealistic AI-powered inspiration photos. Dr Melissa Doft, a double board-certified plastic surgeon in New York, says this has made managing patient expectations particularly challenging. “It used to be that people would come in saying, ‘I want to look like my friend,’” she says. “Now there are programs you can tell ‘Make me look prettier’ which is such an unusual request because pretty is defined so differently depending on who you speak with”.

AI is already impacting our relationships with our body image – research shows that repeated exposure to filtered images of yourself worsens body satisfaction. This dissatisfaction will only be exacerbated if you bring in a fake image as a reference point and then look nothing like it post-surgery. “We’re living in this world of imagination that’s computer-generated,” says Dr Doft. “But there’s a lot more to beauty than just millimetres and proportions, and there’s a judgement in surgery that AI doesn’t have”. 

While at a recent dinner, Dr Doft says she had a conversation with a jewellery designer who said people are coming to him with AI designs, and threatening to go elsewhere if he doesn’t try to make the structurally unstable design. For every surgeon who refuses to attempt an AI-inspired result, there’s another who will make a false promise. Still, Dr Doft says it’s her younger patients in particular who need to see a visualisation of her results before undergoing the procedure. To bring this to life, she uses Photoshop – which she says has been helpful for rhinoplasties but less so for breast augmentation. “I had two patients who saw the image, had the surgery and then still decided that they wanted a different size,” she says. 

The cosmetic industry is a visual field, so it makes sense that AI as a visualisation tool is quickly becoming the most talked-about use case for the new technology. But AI plastic surgery simulation tools like FaceTouchUp only scratch the surface of use cases for AI in the aesthetic industry both today and in the near future. This includes more AI-assisted robotic surgeries, AI software building 3D models for reconstructive efforts, AI used for post-operative predictions and management, and other possibilities that are more difficult to imagine right now. These will continue to shift alongside our relationship with AI – at the moment, most people’s interaction with AI is with conversational chatbots, but the push towards autonomous AI agents is growing rapidly.

“We’re living in this world of imagination that’s computer-generated. But there’s a lot more to beauty than just millimetres and proportions, and there’s a judgement in surgery that AI doesn’t have”

Kevin Lamont Bachar, founder of B Beauty Medical Aesthetics, points to a 2017 Stanford University study where AI was able to diagnose skin cancer as one of the first proofs of concept that AI can be used across the hyper-visual field of cosmetic medicine. “Knowing we have a lot of decision fatigue as physicians, clinicians and nurses, using AI as a tool to supplement [those decisions] has always been something that we’ve talked about,” he says. “We use data in so many other aspects of medicine that it’s just a smart segue for these technological tools to enter the world of medical aesthetics.” The biggest challenge? You have to train the algorithm. 

The problem with assuming that AI is an unbiased data centre that can not only schedule appointments but analyse images and make recommendations for treatments is that it has a biased idea of what’s “beautiful” or aesthetically desirable. “When we feed [AI] with the science for our clinical studies, it’s all been very Eurocentric,” says Bachar. “What we are feeding AI is what it is going to spit out; so do we want to continue to consistently send this message of what beauty looks like?” Historically, AI hasn’t been trained on diverse imagery and data, which impacts its recommendations. Bachar does see potential for AI to assist in the clinical aspects of his job, but he also believes we have to start by dissecting its biases. 

Bachar believes the age of AI is a “turning point” for the cosmetic industry, where modern practitioners can forge a more diverse and inclusive future, alongside AI. “Our customer is seeking personalisation and guidance,” he says. “We have the opportunity to train AI correctly”. What that looks like, according to Bachar, involves stepping away from the aesthetic industry to get a holistic view of what’s beautiful in the world. That, however, isn’t exactly the direction that Big Tech, driven by profit and a desire for rapid acceleration, is currently steering the ship. In the coming months and years, the cosmetic surgery industry will encounter more people like Layla who have asked Chat how to fix their faces, instead of turning to a friend or qualified professional. The future of AI-powered aesthetics, then, depends on how much weight we will give its answer.

* Name has been changed