We’ve entered the “undetectable era” of plastic surgery — cosmetic procedures and filler are no longer obvious on celebrities’ faces, rather more celebrities simply look like they haven’t aged.
Lindsay Lohan, 38 — whose new holiday movie “Our Little Secret” is currently at #1 on Netflix in the United States — has gotten the brunt of the speculation.
Fans say she appears the youngest she’s looked in years, but can’t distinguish what cosmetic work she may have had done. An esthetician compared photos of Lohan in a viral TikTok in November, saying, “I need to know absolutely everything that occurred between 2018 to 2024 to have this crazy of a transformation. I’m in the industry and I’m at a loss for words.”
Others have called out this trend among other celebrities.
“Who is the magic engineer?” one TikToker asked over transformation photos of Lohan and Christina Aguilera. “I don’t care if it’s unrealistic. I want it.”
What is the ‘undetectable era’ of plastic surgery?
TikTokers have declared the suspected rise in undetectable plastic surgery the dawn of a new era.
In a video with 6.3 million views, Dr. Prem Tripathi, a board certified facial plastic surgeon, says “what people are doing to their face in the next year is going to blow you away.” He goes on to define this era as “the time in aesthetics that we’ve all hoped for and waited for, where the procedures that people are having done to their face are not detectable.”
“It’s not just undetectable; it’s understated,” says Dr. Anthony Rossi, a dermatologist and surgeon who hosts the podcast “Give Good Face: Clean Clinical Science.” “It’s very minimalistic, but with improvements, and so it’s not this over-the-top, in-your-face, big cheeks, frozen face. It’s really more subtle. It’s really nice and refined. I love it. I think New York has been like that for a while and now other areas are catching up with it.”
Is the ‘undetectable era’ changing how we view plastic surgery?
Dermatologist Dr. Brooke Jeffy says she hopes the undetectable era inspires people to take a more natural, subtle approach, not just to treatments, but to their beauty regimens overall.
“There has been a time where people almost wanted a certain look,” she says. “It was kind of almost a symbol, like a status symbol, if you kind of looked a certain way that people knew that you could afford to have these things. But I do think that now people want a much more natural look.”
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She wants people to know, however, that undetectable beauty isn’t achieved just by going under the knife. It also involves living a healthy lifestyle.
“We’re also seeing more of a focus along with it in realizing that you can’t just do things to your face,” Jeffy says. “It is more about taking care of your whole body. It matters what sort of fuel you’re putting in. It matters if you’re drinking alcohol, if you’re smoking. So I think that it means a step more in the right direction for how we should be taking care of our bodies overall.”
Honesty is more important than ever
Mental health experts agree that celebrities sharing what work they’ve had done can help fans maintain healthy, realistic beauty standards. The undetectable era may bring less transparency — making it more crucial than ever for people to stop comparing their looks to celebrities’.
“It may establish an unattainable ideal, and I think that the more we get comfortable with who we are, the less that becomes an issue,” psychotherapist Stephanie Sarkis says. “We tend to not compare ourselves with others when we are feeling OK about ourselves.”
