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There’s something different about how we look these days. Faces used to practically have logos: forehead by Botox, lips by Juvederm, and cheeks by Restylane. Now, you can’t exactly figure out what people are getting done. Is it that new fish thing? Some sort of newfangled facelift? If work is being done, it’s subtle. Sotto voce. It’s the Undetectable Era.
“It’s demure,” observes celebrity makeup artist Daniel Martin, when I ask for his thoughts on this new trend. It’s mindful, to mimic the famous TikTok saying. As the go-to no-makeup-makeup artist for nearly two decades, Martin’s long been an expert at understated beauty. These days, he jokes about the new “no-filler-filler cheek,” saying, “the technology and the work now are definitely different. It’s undetectable, and more unnoticeable.”
The “Undetectable Era” is a phrase mentioned in a viral TikTok by Prem Tripathi, MD, a plastic surgeon in the Bay Area who had noticed the rise of a kind of surgery where you’re “really not going to be able to pinpoint anything” other than that people looking great. Like your most expensive cashmere sweater, today’s new flawless face is a soft weave—perhaps of several injectables, lasers, and surgeries. Cheeks plump, but not pillowy; skin looking taut, but not stretched—it’s the new Hollywood definition of “aging gracefully” (with the help of thousands of dollars’ worth of dermatologist and plastic surgery appointments). Catherine Chang, MD, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, describes a good result in the Undetectable Era as “no one should just look at you without a ‘Before’ and ‘After,’ and know that you’ve had any work done.”
It’s not merely a matter of taste or trends, but also new medical advancements that are making this era possible. Skin boosters, a new category of injectable tweakments, have been added to the dermatology tool kit. Polynucleotides and Profhilo, two popular skin boosters that are approved in Europe, stimulate the skin’s collagen on a deeper level, with many describing the effect as “healthy,” the new synonym for “natural.” Eunice Park, MD, a dermatologist in New York, says of their effect: “These are all very subtle things that make you look good, but someone’s not going to really hone in and say, ‘Oh my gosh, you got this done.’” Some doctors are also trying to steer patients toward these newer options, and away from asking for filler and Botox as the universal fix-its for loss of elasticity and skin laxity—issues they weren’t necessarily intended to solve. Park says that she is constantly telling patients that “Botox and fillers do not tighten the skin. I could say this probably a hundred times over.”
Joanne, Kristen Bell’s sarcastic female lead character on Netflix’s hit show Nobody Wants This, quips that a “bad facelift” is her greatest fear. Bad sideburn areas used to be the dead giveaway that a secret facelift had taken place. But in the Undetectable Era, surgical artistry in the top echelon of plastic surgeons has made work appear flawless. The rise of techniques like endoscopic plastic surgery (which Park surprisingly describes as “minimally invasive”) and the deep plane facelift, which goes into the skin’s deeper layers, has created more natural-looking results. Facelift scars can now be as surgically precise as the French seam on the back of The Row’s white T-shirt. Top surgeons take special care to cleverly hide scars so that they can’t be seen at a conversational distance, or zoomed in on a Getty photo. “The telltale sign of a facelift can be around the tragus, but even there, we usually put scars behind that piece of cartilage” Tripathi says. The scars are also smaller, akin to a fine line. For example, Chang prefers to use the shadows or crevice of an ear. “If you’re hiding a scar, you don’t want it on an area that the eye is drawn to; you really want to hide it in crevices and you want to hide it along something called Langer’s lines,” Chang says, referring to topological invisible lines of tension first described by Karl Langer, an anatomist.
Lasers can minimize scars even further. “We’re judiciously using lasers now, not just to improve the look of scars years later, but to fundamentally change the biology of the scar healing process,” Tripathi says. Scars can even be tattooed over by a medical tattoo artist to ensure a better match with skin tone. Depending upon the surgeon, recovery from surgical procedures can be speedier, with many of the top doctors creating a holistic recovery plan that can lead to better results. “If somebody’s not optimized nutritionally or they’re not following a good postoperative course, then that can dramatically change whether they get a good overall result,” Tripathi says. A good facelift is the new luxury, requiring hours of time, craftsmanship, money, and research (just like a stealth wealth garment).
Some of us have always wanted our aesthetic work to remain undetectable, our invisible labor in fighting against the forces of an ageist society. Some others, says Jordan Terner, MD, a plastic surgeon in New York City, want to wear filler on their faces the same way they would wear Gucci or Prada. “They want people to know that they are getting stuff done, and they can afford it.”
With the rise of no-makeup-makeup in the past few years, many of us are familiar with the paradox of effortless-looking work, having seen the everyday makeup tutorials with 15 steps or the Google Docs outlining extensive skin care routines. The Undetectable Era ups the ante of a secret beauty achievement—a person could attribute their enhanced appearance to drinking water and reducing stress, or they could have gotten a secret facelift. Ultimately, surgery is not a tweakment; a blepharoplasty or face lift is a full-on treatment. We can lie to others, but we can’t lie to ourselves that we aren’t doing “that much.” “I have patients who are in their seventies. I try to tell them, ‘It’s okay. You’re 76 years old. It’s okay to have a line. You want to look natural and fresh and lifted. You don’t want to look drawn and tired, but you can look fresh and lifted and still have some lines on your face,’” Terner says. Aging, of course, isn’t a choice. But the Undetectable Era does offer new options for those who want to go about it quietly.
A version of this story appears in the February 2025 issue of ELLE.