Special Section
Transform Yourself in the New Year
Here are the latest, most popular cosmetic procedures for a new you.
By Michele Wojciechowski —
The New Year is often a time when people start with a clean slate. They begin eating healthful foods, working out at the gym, making sure to get more sleep—anything they can to transform themselves.
This is also a good time to look into cosmetic procedures. Whether they’re non-surgical or surgical, they may give you the appearance you’ve always desired.
RELAX OR RESTORE
According to Dr. George Gavrila, founder, president, and medical director of ProMD Health, there are many popular cosmetic procedures—known as minimally invasive—that can change your look without going under the knife. Most favored are neuromodulators, which are injectable solutions such as Botox, Dysport, and Daxxify. In 2024, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons agreed, citing that nationwide, more than nine million people had neuromodulators injected.
“These will relax targeted facial muscles to smooth patients’ expressions,” Gavrila explains.
Besides this common treatment, he says his practice is starting to see the resurgence of dermal fillers that help restore volume loss, enhance facial contours, and rejuvenate anatomical areas like the cheeks, jawline, and lips.
“Restorative procedures replace the tissue that has atrophied through the normal process of aging,” he says. “The skin itself loses its strength and integrity, and so things begin to sag. Because of gravity, you may see the formation of jowls and the deepening of nasolabial folds [also known as ‘smile lines’].”
AUGMENTATION VERSUS RESTORATION
Patients with a recessed chin or a weak jawline or cheekbones may seek out augmentation— procedures in which additional tissue replacements are added.
But one mistake some people make is when they see a specialist to get their “lips done,” they ask for augmentation rather than restoration. This may result in lips looking huge rather than natural.
“It’s my mission to make sure that patients who are coming in for restoration don’t accidentally get augmentation, and there’s a very clear distinction between the two,” explains Gavrila. When you have your lips restored, you want to have them look the way they did prior to aging. But when you want your lips augmented, you want them to be bigger than they previously were.
With new procedures and techniques, Gavrila says that they can now slowly change people’s appearances. “We get closer to what you think you want to look like, and if you don’t like it, you can have it dissolved,” he says. “With the technology we have today, you can progressively work toward your outcome, and if, for some reason, you don’t like it, we just put in a little bit of dissolver, and— boom—it’s gone!”
In some circumstances, they use the patient’s own stem cells and fat with procedures, which tends to last longer because they stimulate organic tissue production.
“The stem cells and all the goodies we put in there improve their skin quality, the health of their muscle, and the whole entire face gets better,” he says.
PRE- AND POST-WEIGHT LOSS PROCEDURES
A lot of minimally invasive non-surgical procedures as well as plastic surgeries are being done today because so many people are using medications to lose weight. Gavrila says that this can lead to an accelerated atrophy or a reduction of fat in the face, which may prematurely age it. But at their practice, if patients come in before or as they’re using weight-loss medication, the providers may use the injectable Sculptra, which can not only replace collagen and elastin that has worn away, but preserve their facial fat.
“What I often tell patients is your skin eventually turns into something like linen, and it folds readily, and the creases are evident,” he explains. “But your skin was once like denim—it’s strong, it bounces back, and has a little bit of stretch and rebound to it. We turn the skin back to denim.”
When people lose weight, they also may end up with extra or stretched-out skin on their bodies. This is where plastic surgeries come in. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the abdominoplasty or “tummy tuck” is in the top five cosmetic procedures performed in 2024—for the fourth year in a row.
“We’re seeing a lot of patients who have lost a significant amount of weight, so a lot of the more common procedures we see tend to do with lifting the body in different areas—whether that’s a breast lift, face lift, arm lift, or thigh lift,” says Dr. Brendan Collins, an attending plastic surgeon at the Weinberg Women’s Center at Mercy Medical Center. “A lot of what we end up doing is trying to restore volume where it should be, and excise and take care of laxity where it shouldn’t be—on the whole body.”
One of the most common examples would be the abdominoplasty. Collins says that weight loss can leave a heavy amount of excess skin in the abdomen.
“Patients want that removed and contoured, muscles tightened, and liposuction to the flanks,” he says. “Another [procedure] would be a breast lift, where we’re lifting and shaping the breast to a more natural shape. By doing so, we’re shaping the breast tissue, but also excising the excess skin in order to tighten and lift the breast.”
Sometimes, this requires using implants.
If you choose to get plastic surgery, Collins stresses to make sure you use a provider who is board-certified.
“I see patients who have gone to other countries [for plastic surgery], and a lot of times, they end up in the ER because they’re having bad complications,” says Collins. “It’s really important that patients do their own due diligence on who is going to be operating on them.”
OTHER PROCEDURAL OPTIONS
Of course, there are other quite common procedures such as face lifts, eyelid lifts, and even “nose jobs” still being done. Liposuction is used, Collins says, in conjunction with just about everything they do because they’re not only lifting areas of the body, but also restoring volume, and they tend to use a patient’s own fat.
Another popular procedure is for women who have experienced post-pregnancy changes in their bodies and are finished having children. Some seek abdominoplasties with breast lifts.
“It addresses the entire torso and can really be super dramatic in the type of changes that a patient can expect to see,” says Collins.
Whatever you choose to have done or not, remember that the only person’s opinion that matters in how you look is your own.