A purported plastic surgeon has sparked a fierce backlash online after sharing extravagant before and after photos of $50,000 facelifts.
The doctor, known only as Dr. Kim online, has more than 216,000 followers on TikTok, with each video racking up more than four million views each.
The clips show typical-looking middle-aged people, followed by a video of their face about a week after surgery, with skin that appears to be pulled back a lot.
Social media users have questioned the anonymous doctor’s credentials, labeling the doctor’s work. “scary” or “failed.”
Other surgeons have also questioned the validity and techniques of the story.
The doctor, known only as Dr. Kim online, has more than 216,000 followers on TikTok, with each video racking up more than four million views each.
In one video, viewed 6.3 million times, a 46-year-old man (pictured) is seen with wider eyelids, a stretched face and a chiseled jaw. “Dr. Kim, if this is real, he screwed up,” one TikTok user wrote. A second said: ‘Enough, they’ll revoke your license.’
While attempts have been made to locate Dr. Kim, linking him to separate clinics in Shanghai and Seoul, his identity is still unknown.
Each of their videos shows a before and after photo of a patient’s procedures, typically facelifts and eyelid procedures such as epicanthoplasty and blepharoplasty, which aim to remove excess skin and bags around the patient’s eyes.
A facelift, which often costs more than £10,000, lifts and pulls back facial skin to make the face look smoother and smoother.
One of them, viewed 6.3 million times, shows a 46-year-old man with wider eyelids, a stretched face and a chiseled jaw.
“Dr. Kim, if this is real, you screwed up,” one commenter wrote. A second said: ‘Enough, your license is revoked.’
In a separate thread on Reddit about Dr. Kim’s work, one person wrote, “He created monsters.”
Another commented: “The surgeon is actually Dr. Frankenstein.”
Others, however, pointed out the short period of time between the before and after photos.
Patients’ faces are not completely healed and are often still bruised or visibly swollen. A video shares the results just seven days after surgery.
According to the NHS, full recovery from a facelift can take between two and four weeks.
It can take up to a year for minor swelling, bruising, tightness, and numbness to go away, but usually only you notice them.
One Reddit user said: ‘Maybe wait until they heal to see the photos?’ It looks like he’s mutilating corpses.
Dr. Daniel Barrett, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon who has more than two million followers on TikTok, said, “Anyone looks crazy seven to nine days after facial surgery, especially if they want to demonstrate any results.”
‘We don’t know what these people will be like in the long term. But I’d love to know what kind of techniques you’re using to get these results.”
He added: ‘This is a radical change and it is important to know what will happen in the long term.
“When looking at before and after results, be sure to look four to six months later or a year later to see if these results are lasting or not.”
Dr Anthony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Michigan, US, said some of Dr Kim’s procedures were “unnecessary plastic surgery” and had left some patients with protruding earlobes and others looking like be 12 years old.
He said some had had an open brow lift (a brow lift in which an incision is made in the front of the hairline), a face lift, which pulls the skin up and back, and an upper and lower eyelid lift.
Dr. Youn cautioned that the open brown lift is not routinely performed because it leaves a large scar at the front of the hairline.
While attempts have been made to locate Dr. Kim, linking him to separate clinics in Shanghai and Seoul, his identity is still unknown.
Some users have pointed out the short period of time between before and after photos. Patients’ faces are not completely healed and are often still bruised or visibly swollen. A video shares the results just seven days after surgery. According to the NHS, full recovery from a facelift can take between two and four weeks. It can take up to a year for very minor swelling, bruising, tightness, and numbness to go away, but usually only you notice them.
If these patients’ hairline stays the same for life, the scar can “somewhat” be hidden, but if the hairline recedes, the scar will be completely visible and a hair transplant would be the only way to hide it, he said. .
However, Dr. Youn added that a clip from one of Dr. Kim’s patients shows her looking “fantastic” a month after surgery.
Popular types of facelifts include so-called “liquid lifts,” which are achieved through a series of carefully placed Botox injections and facial fillers.
Skin tightening treatments that use lasers or light technology, rather than surgical incisions, have also gained popularity.
More expensive thread lifts, which appear to be a possible technique used by Dr. Kim, involve inserting small, acid-containing soluble fibers under the skin, which are then bound together, producing a tightening effect.
It comes as Marc Pacifico, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, told MailOnline last month that the “transformative” combined face and neck lift was among the procedures likely to see the highest demand in 2024.
He said interest in the operation had been driven mainly by social media, where people realized how easy it was to spot a facelift in someone with a pure neck.
“Without a good, harmonious improvement to a person’s neck, a facelift does not look as good or as natural as it could,” he added.
“If you don’t have a good neck and a good face, we can immediately detect that something is not quite right,” he said.
“If we want to get the best result, which is someone who doesn’t look like they’ve had surgery, very natural, very fresh, with a nice jaw and a nice neck, a more complicated surgery is required.”
More complicated means more expensive, and Pacifico claims that a high-quality combined face and neck lift is likely to cost between £22,000 and £26,000.