Beauty Fandom: The Fusion of Fantasy, Aesthetics, and Ethics

On this episode of the “Anti-Aging Insights” podcast, Dr. Teri Fisher discusses the emerging trend of “Beauty Fandom” revealed in the Galderma NEXT report. This trend focuses on niche appearances, idolization, and fantasy, largely influenced by social media platforms like TikTok. Dr. Fisher delves into the ethical considerations practitioners face in responding to clients’ requests for treatments that aim to bring digital filters and niche appearances to life.

The three core components driving Beauty Fandom are: “core fandoms come to life,” “celebrity fetishization in motion,” and “digital filters in the real world.” These elements reflect a desire for extreme enhancements to resemble cultural icons or digital avatars. Dr. Fisher shares his personal stance on aesthetic treatments, emphasizing the importance of enhancing natural beauty to boost confidence and well-being.

While acknowledging the potential increase in demand for transformative treatments, Dr. Fisher stresses his commitment to promoting inner beauty and sculpted confidence rather than creating clones of celebrities or digital personas. He invites listeners to connect with him to explore aesthetic options aligned with these values. Tune in for more insights on upcoming trends from the Galderma NEXT report, and follow Dr. Teri Fisher on Instagram or his website for further discussions.

Key Insights

• “Beauty Fandom” is a trend in aesthetics focused on niche appearances, idolization, and fantasy.
• Social media, especially TikTok, plays a significant role in driving the interest in aesthetic treatments to bring digital filters and niche appearances to reality.
• Core aspects of beauty fandom include “core fandoms come to life,” “celebrity fetishization in motion,” and “digital filters in the real world.”
• Consumers are increasingly seeking treatments to emulate favorite cultural icons such as Bella Hadid or achieve features akin to digital avatars.
• The trend may lead to a rise in demand for treatments to resemble celebrities or digital avatars, with some individuals aiming to become clones of their idols.
• Dr. Teri Fisher emphasizes the importance of enhancing natural beauty and inner confidence through aesthetic treatments rather than aiming to create clones of others.
• He believes in “sculpted confidence” and enhancing natural features to boost inner beauty and self-assurance.
• Dr. Fisher is not inclined towards extreme transformations that aim to replicate the appearance of celebrities or digital avatars.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Teri Fisher: [00:00:00] Hey there and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. As always it’s wonderful to have you along. This week, we are talking about the next trend that has been identified in the Galderma NEXT report. And this one is called “Beauty Fandom.” This is a fascinating trend, and to be honest this is one that has some ethical questions that come up for practitioners. As you’ll hear, this can be about subtle enhancements with aesthetic treatments all the way to quite dramatic enhancements that some would describe a little bit over the top, but let’s get into that. I’m going to reserve my own judgment until the end. And I’ll give you my thoughts and my own personal opinion on this. But first I want to describe to you what is meant when they identify this trend of beauty fandom. If you haven’t listened to the previous episodes, starting with episode [00:01:00] 67, I encourage you to do that. I talked a little bit about the macro trends. And then I got into some of the individual trends that has been identified in this report. So again, please go back and have a listen to those if you’re interested in that, but today we are focusing on beauty fandom.

So, what is this idea of beauty fandom? This is all about enhancements that have a focus on niche appearances, on idolization, on fantasy. There is a new and more extreme take on this in the aesthetics world, and a lot of this comes from social media where people, clients, are looking at cultural icons that are out there. They’re looking at different filters that can be applied to themselves and to others, and this is causing an interest, and an increase, in requests for treatments that will [00:02:00] bring these filters, these niche appearances, to the real world. The big question here is how are practitioners going to respond to this? This is controversial. This is a delicate topic. And it does, as I mentioned, bring a question of ethics to where a practitioner is going to sit in terms of if they’re going to offer these types of treatments. So again, I’ll address that type of questioning at the end of this podcast. But first let’s talk a little bit more about the niche itself and this trend, beauty fandom.

So what’s driving it? As I mentioned, there is a huge driving force behind this from social media. Tik Tok especially has been a huge contributing factor in this because we are seeing icons, people out there that others look up to, and they are [00:03:00] using digital filters and they’re morphing their real faces into, for example, animated characters. They are bridging this gap between fantasy and reality. And so this is becoming more and more commonplace now.

This can be broken down into three main components. The first one is “core fandoms come to life.” An example of this that was identified in this report was a niche fandom. You can use the hashtag #fairycore to look this up, or #barbiecore to look this up, or #e-girl, and what we’re seeing is that aesthetic treatments are becoming more and more based on these appearances that are being portrayed in social media, through these types of [00:04:00] filters. One of the subsets of this is #fairyearsurgery and this hashtag has gathered over 64.8 million views on Tik Tok. That gives you an idea of the extent of this type of interest.

The second core aspect to this is known as “celebrity fetishization in motion.” This has to do with consumer’s fixation on celebrity culture, and this means that the average consumer may not necessarily want to just look like a favorite celebrity, but they want to exactly emulate their appearance. So this means that if there’s somebody out there that a consumer is idolizing, then they will, perhaps, make the decision to do whatever they possibly can using aesthetic treatments to emulate this person as [00:05:00] precisely as they can. And one of the influencers in this regard is the supermodel, Bella Hadid. There are lots of consumers out there that want to get any aesthetic treatment that they can to emulate Bella Hadid’s appearance as precisely as they can.

The third element to this is known as “digital filters in the real world.” And this is now merging the digital and the physical world. We are seeing people that want to have more permanent ways to achieve the proportions, the features, of their favorite digital avatars. This report identified a woman who has now been dubbed the “two dimensional babe.” She underwent surgical transformation to achieve enormous eyes and a 2-D flat face to emulate her favorite anime character. We have never seen this before, but this is an [00:06:00] extreme take on empowering oneself to become your idealized best self.

So what’s next with this trend? Well, we do expect to see an increase in demand for these types of treatments. We’ll likely see a less extreme take for those who want to have some appearance that may be a little bit more similar to their celebrity idols, but maybe don’t want to look like them exactly. On the other hand, there are a select few that may embrace future technological advancements to look as much as possible like their idols. In other words, if they could, they would want to be a clone of these idols.

So, what does this mean for practitioners? This is where I get back to that initial question that I raised. You know, for me, personally, I feel that aesthetic treatments are there to enhance someone’s wellbeing, to enhance their beauty, and ultimately to enhance their confidence. I believe [00:07:00] in natural results. That’s my personal take on it. So at this stage, in my career, I am not interested in creating a new person out of aesthetic treatments, simply because a client wants to look like someone else as much as possible. In other words, they want to be a clone of that person. That’s not what I’m interested in doing. That’s my personal opinion. I feel that there is a lot of benefit in aesthetics, but I believe it comes from enhancing your own natural beauty, bringing out that inner confidence that you have, what I call “sculpted confidence,” and making sure that we do whatever we can to work with your natural features and enhance those if you want to, to help you to be more content with the way you look, and ultimately that allows you to have stronger, inner beauty and allows you to go about your life with that confidence that we all desire. The idea of taking this over the top, creating a clone of somebody out there, creating an [00:08:00] avatar of a digital person, these things are not what I am interested in doing.

So having said that, if those values align with what you are looking for, then let’s have a chat about it. Happy to do that at any point.

Thank you again for tuning in. We have another trend to look into next week, and then we’re going to be wrapping things up with this mini series of trends identified by the Galderma NEXT report. Thanks to Galderma for bringing these to our attention.

As always feel free to connect with me on Instagram or on my website, Dr. Teri Fisher, D R T E R I F I S H E R.

I look forward to chatting with you again real soon. Have a wonderful week. Take care.