Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Articles

While the stigma around plastic surgery and, more specifically, injectables, has faded significantly over recent years, few celebrities talk as openly about their experiences with it as Jenny Mollen.

The mother of two, actress, and the New York Times bestselling author of I Like You Just the Way I Am has cultivated huge followings on Twitter and Instagram—The Huffington Post has recognized her as one of the funniest women on both platforms—simply by being herself. And a notable part of that is her love of injectables, particularly Botox.

“Whenever I need it, I just gotta go in and replenish. I don’t ever plan it. I just think of it as an ongoing situation,” Jenny Mollen said of the frequency with which she gets Botox injections in a recent interview with Allure magazine. “I like to think of my Botox situation as I’m in school year-round.”

The 40-year-old Mollen often shares those occasions on her Instagram Story. Even in this age of increasing candidness and acceptance, Mollen’s transparency is striking. But for her, it’s the only way she’s ever known. Her parents, she said, were always fans of cosmetic enhancements, so she was never exposed to the stigmas against fillers.

“When I saved my placenta, my mom was like, ‘Can I have it to inject into my face?’” Mollen said. “I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure that doesn’t happen, but where are you going to get that done?’”

Mollen tried Botox for the first time at age 29 and immediately understood the difference it could make in her appearance. “That was the first time I started to think, OK, wait, this could look softer, or I could get rid of this line. Or, maybe if I did a little bit up here, these lines wouldn’t be so intense when I was raising my brows and just emoting,” she said.

She insisted, however, that it wasn’t insecurities about her appearance that led her to that moment. “No, I was just like, Wait, this could be better,” Mollen said. “Always in life, I’m like, Oh, is there something that would make this look a little bit more to my liking? It wasn’t really, Oh, I hate this about myself. It was, Let me see what I can do.

“I think you just kind of have to accept and embrace what’s happening to you naturally,” she said. “And, if there’s something that you can maybe lessen, cool. But you sort of have to just ride the wave. That’s the exciting part about living in this age—solutions are popping up all the time.”

“This is what I tell friends and doctors, facialists and nutritionists, make-up counter employees, concerned Instagram commenters, nosy strangers on the street. No, I am not tired. No, I am not sad. I am not hungover or hungry. I don’t have celiac disease, and there is no black mold in my apartment. You might not know it from looking at me, but I like my life.”

Alice Gregory is plagued by dark circles under her eyes. She wrote about her plight recently for Allure magazine. On bad days, she writes, they’re the same color as “fresh bruises.” She’s spent hundreds of dollars on concealers and untold hours applying them. “Some,” she says, “are better than others, but all produce, to various degrees, a creepy, crepe-y grayness that looks worse, in my opinion, than my bare, discolored skin.”

So she set out to find a more effective remedy.

While under-eye circles are partly genetic, a number of external factors, including diet, lifestyle, and allergies can make them worse. As can aging. As we get older, the fat pads all across our face get smaller and move down. It’s particularly noticeable under the eyes because the skin around the eyes is the thinnest on the body.

Which is to say that under-eye circles are one of the earliest signs of aging.

At only 31, Alice had already noticed that her under-eye circles had worsened over the last few years. The effect, she was told by a dermatologist, was being heightened because brownish splotches, AKA hyperpigmentation, had also formed around her eyes, caused in part by eczema.

Alice was presented with a few different options that could potentially improve her circles. Platelet-rich plasma injections—blood is extracted from the patient, spun in a centrifuge to increase its platelet concentration, then injected into the targeted part of the body—and microneedling would boost collagen production, which would thicken the skin under her eyes enough that fewer blue blood vessels could show through.

The most effective approach would be blepharoplasty, or eyelid surgery. For those who have protruding fat pads under their eyes, like Alice, the fat can be redistributed in the lower eyelids to eliminate puffiness or bulges. In the process, the surgeon may also make adjustments to correct special issues, like muscle laxity.

Alice opted for a less-invasive approach: a hyaluronic acid filler, like Restylane-L or Juvéderm Vollure, “robust enough to lift but soft enough to be used in a delicate area,” as her doctor describes them. The results would last about a year.

“My three most attentive female friends confirmed I looked a lot better, but only after I reported what I had done to myself; my husband didn’t notice anything at all, which, when I think about it, is exactly the reaction I had wanted but not articulated,” Alice writes. “The dark circles are still there—let’s not kid ourselves. But they’re less the result of ever-worsening facial cavities and due more to hyperpigmentation, which is slowly improving. I now look a little tired rather than agonized.”