A TikTok user claiming to be a plastic surgeon has sparked fierce online backlash after sharing wild before-and-after pictures from $50,000 face lifts.
The medic, known only as ‘Dr Kim’, boasts more than 216,000 followers on TikTok, with their videos gathering in excess of four million views each.
Clips show typical looking middle-aged people, followed by a video of their face around a week after surgery, with their skin appearing to be very tightly pulled back.
Social media users have challenged the anonymous medic’s credentials, labelling the medic’s work ‘scary’ or ‘botched’.
Other surgeons have also questioned the account’s validity and techniques.
The medic, known only as Dr Kim online, boasts more than 216,000 followers on TikTok , with each video gathering in excess of four million views each
In one video, seen 6.3million times, a 46-year-old (pictured) is seen with wider eyelids, a stretched face and chiseled jaw. ‘Dr Kim, if this is real you screwed up,’ one TikTok user wrote. A second said: ‘Enough, your license is revoked’
While attempts have been made to track Dr Kim down, linking them to separate clinics in Shanghai and Seoul, their identity is still unknown.
Each of his videos show a before-and-after photo of a patient’s procedures, usually facelifts and eyelid procedures like epicanthoplasty and blepharoplasty — which both aim to remove extra skin and bags around a patient’s eyes.
A facelift, which often cost in excess of £10,000, lifts and pulls back the skin on the face to make the face look tighter and smoother.
In one video, seen 6.3million times, a 46-year-old is pictured with wider eyelids, a stretched face and chiselled 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 discussing Dr Kim’s work, one person wrote: ‘He created monsters.’
Another commented: ‘The surgeon is actually Doctor Frankenstein.’
Others, however, pointed to the short period of time between the before and after photos.
Patients faces are not completely healed and they often still have bruises or are visibly swollen. One video shares the results just seven days after surgery.
According to the NHS it can take between two to four weeks to fully recover from a facelift.
It can take up to one year for very minor swelling, bruising, tightness and numbness to reside, but those typically are only noticeable to those who go under the knife.
One Reddit user said: ‘Maybe wait until they heal for the pics? It just looks like he’s mutilating corpses.’
Dr Daniel Barrett, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who boasts more than two million TikTok followers, said: ‘Anybody looks crazy after seven to nine days after facial surgery especially if you wanted to demonstrate any results.
‘We don’t know what these people will look like long term. But I’d love to know what type of techniques he’s doing to get these results.’
He added: ‘This is radical change and it’s important to know what happens long term.
‘When you’re looking at before-and-after results make sure you’re looking at four to six months down the line or a year down the line to see if these results are long lasting or not.’
Dr Anthony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Michigan, US, said that some of Dr Kim’s procedures were ‘unnecessary plastic surgery’ and had left some patients with their ear lobes sticking out and others looking like they’re 12 years old.
He said some had been given an open brow lift – a brow lift where an incision is made at the front of the hairline –a facelift, which pulls the skin up and back, and an upper and lower eyelid lift.
Dr Youn warned that the open brown lift is not commonly performed because it leaves a large scar at the front of the hairline.
While attempts have been made to track Dr Kim down, linking him to separate clinics in Shanghai and Seoul, his identity is still unknown
Some users have pointed to the short period of time between the before and after photos. Patients faces are not completely healed and they often still have bruises or are visibly swollen. One video shares the results just seven days after surgery. According to the NHS it can take between two to four weeks to fully recover from a facelift. It can take up to one year for very minor swelling, bruising, tightness and numbness to reside, but those typically are only noticeable to you
If these patients’ hairlines remain the same for life, the scar can ‘kind of’ 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 of one of Dr Kim’s patients shows her looking ‘fantastic’ one month after surgery.
Among popular types of face lifts are the so-called ‘liquid-lifts’ – achieved by a series of carefully positioned injections of Botox and facial fillers.
Skin-tightening treatments that use lasers or light technology, instead of surgical incisions, have also soared in popularity.
More expensive thread lifts — which appear to be one possible technique used by Dr Kim — involves inserting tiny dissolvable fibres containing acid under the skin, which are then stitched together, resulting in a tightening effect.
It comes as Marc Pacifico, president of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, last month told MailOnline the ‘transformative’ combined face and neck lift was among the procedures likely to see the biggest demand in 2024.
He said interest in the op had been driven primarily by social media with people realising how easy it was to spot a face lift on someone with an unadulterated neck.
‘Without a good, harmonious improvement in someone’s neck, a face lift doesn’t look as good as it could or as natural as it could,’ he added.
‘If you haven’t got a good neck, and you’ve got a good face, we can spot immediately that something’s not quite right,’ he said.
‘If we’re going to get the very best outcome, which is someone that doesn’t look like they’ve had surgery, very natural, very fresh, with a nice jawline and nice neck, more involved surgery is required.’
More involved means more expensive, with Mr Pacifico saying a high-quality combined face and neck lift is likely to cost between £22,000 and £26,000.
