The Big Dissolve

They blew out their faces. Now they're melting them down.

- Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz

SINCE ROUGHLY 2016, MILLIONS of people have gone to dermatologists to put things in their faces with one particular goal: to look like sexy babies. The way they achieved this was with filler-generally acid and fat injections. This era of filler created a specific aesthetic marked by heart-shaped faces, teeny-tiny noses, and full, puffy lips and cheeks.

Quite recently, faces have begun to go the opposite way.

"I can't remember the last time somebody asked me for big, juicy, plump lips," says Dhaval Bhanusali, the doctor behind Martha Stewart's ageless skin.

If you know famous faces, the transition can be defined as this: "Everyone wanted to look like Kylie Jenner. Now they want to look like Bella Hadid," says Matthew James, a British makeup artist and beauty influencer who used fillers for ten years to look "a bit pillowy."

One reason for the shift? It turns out fillers weren't the fluffing elixir of youth people wanted them to be.

Over time, many a filler enthusiast found the substance was actually migrating around the face.

"It was marketed as this riskless thing," says Carly Raye, a Toronto-based content creator who got lip fillers at 20. She had a common experience: Her filler traveled, creating a ring of puffiness around her lips that various surgeons have described as the "Juvéderm mustache," "duck lips," or "Homer Simpson face." Filler could pile up anywhere. "I would smile and I had little bulges on the tops of my cheeks," says Rosie Genute, a Jersey-based makeup artist, of her relocated under-eye filler.

Raye and Genute, like many other patients, were led to believe that minimal risks were involved and that though migration was possible, it was unlikely.