Prick Or Treat?

Don't frown. More Indians are getting fillers and other injectables to look younger. Is the needle the new scalpel?

- Noor Anand Chawla

No one’s hiding anymore. No one’s blaming their sudden bursts of youthfulness to mountain retreats, Sattvic diets, hot yoga or chilled charcoal water. They’re coming clean about injectable beauty treatments.

When Anushka Sharma appeared on Koffee with Karan with a plumped-up pout in 2016, she candidly attributed them to a lip filler. Joe Jonas says he gets injectable procedures for frown lines and wrinkles. “I don’t think it’s necessarily something we have to shy away from,” he told People magazine last year. Katy Perry says she’s used them to fill in her hollow under-eye area. Kylie Jenner’s bountiful lips, she’s acknowledged, come not from her line of lipsticks but from regular jabs of volumiser.

FILLERS GIVE AN INSTANT LIFT, BUT ALSO TRIGGER COLLAGEN AND ELASTIN PRODUCTION, WHICH ARE THE BUILDING BLOCKS FOR HEALTHY, YOUTHFUL SKIN

Injectables are not plastic surgery. No one goes under the knife, no one’s cut open, no one’s in bandages, hiding in pain for weeks as they heal. The targeted, temporary microdoses, delivered via needle, fall into roughly three categories. Muscle-numbing neuromodulators (Botox, Xeomin, Dysport, and Jeuveau) relax forehead wrinkles, droopy lids and frown lines. Dermal fillers (Restylane, Refyne, Defyne and Juvederm) sit under the skin, plumping up lips and cheeks. Mild deoxycholic acids (Kybella) are used on the chin and jawline, where they dissolve minuscule deposits of fat, sharpening features.