Chins Are In

A little over a year ago, Jack realized he didn’t like his face anymore. The 23-year-old from Chicago had just started working as a broadcast journalist at a local station, and being on television meant watching himself on television. “I didn’t find myself totally attractive, and, man, I wished there was something I could do to make myself attractive,” Jack, who preferred to speak pseudonymously, tells me. The more he scrutinized his face, the more he came to believe the problem was with his chin. Or, really, his lack thereof. “When I realized that my chin was the thing that was hindering my looks, I did some research,” Jack says. “I wasn’t planning to get plastic surgery.”

Online, he stumbled across Dr. Benjamin Caughlin, who has made his Chicago-based practice entirely chin-and-jaw-centric, trademarking such procedures as the “Cheekago” (buccal-fat-pad sculpting combined with jawline contouring) and “the Face BBL” (which moves fat from one part of the face to the other). Caughlin’s patients, he says, are 41 percent male these days — many of them hoping for a more chiseled look. (Last year, he claimed responsibility for the comedian Matt Rife’s jawline, a claim Rife has repeatedly denied.) During their initial consultation, Caughlin explained to Jack that while you can’t do much about, say, a big forehead — Jack had always been insecure that his was on the larger end of the spectrum — there’s absolutely something you can do about a weak chin for about $12,000. “He told me I was a perfect candidate for a chin implant,” Jack says. He went into his procedure imagining himself reemerging as an Austin Butler type. “Obviously, he’s a movie star, and I’ll never be as attractive as Austin Butler, but we have similar proportions,” he tells me.

Men getting plastic surgery is not anything new. Although men may not be as open about it as women, they’ve long bulked their calves, slimmed their stomachs, and flown to Turkey for a new head of hair. In recent years, however, the number of men seeking out cosmetic tune-ups has been on a steady rise. “Men are the new victims of the beauty industry,” Caughlin tells me. “They’re learning, Oh shit, if I look better, I feel better.” A number of plastic surgeons I spoke with across the country told me men are starting to pay more attention to their faces. And, more specifically, to the lower third of the face: the chin, the jawline, and the neck. According to the most recent report from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, chin implants have gone up 26 percent.

What men are aspiring toward, Dr. Lara Devgan, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, tells me, is what she describes as the “Disney Prince or Superman aesthetic.” And they often have an actor in mind. Among the celebrities most cited as inspiration in recent years, surgeons say, are Henry Cavill (famous for playing Superman) and a “young Brad Pitt.” Dr. Douglas Steinbrech, a surgeon in New York, makes a point to count his top-requested faces annually. Last year’s included Chris Hemsworth, Ryan Gosling, David Beckham, and Cristiano Ronaldo, all of whom have especially snatched jawlines. Dr. Garth Fisher, of Extreme Makeover fame, believes men are more hesitant about upper-face procedures lest they wind up looking like Robert Redford, Kenny Rogers, or Matt Gaetz, who has what is referred to in the industry as a “Spock brow.”

This is all coming at a time when — after a brief era in which men in the public eye flirted with androgyny — rugged masculinity is back in style. “People want to see men. Fey is out. Men are in,” one New York talent manager told me recently. Even Timothée Chalamet isn’t really a twink anymore. Social media is filled with videos of teenage boys “looksmaxxing” and “mewing,” a tongue exercise that supposedly strengthens the jawline. Google Gosling or Tom Brady and compare the man you see now with a photo of him not that long ago — you’ll notice any cherubic boy chub he once had is gone. They all look like Handsome Squidwards or young Marlon Brandos, perhaps no one more than John Mulaney. When the previously nerdy-cute 42-year-old hosted Saturday Night Live in November, he looked suspiciously subtly hunkier than usual. At first glance, it seemed maybe he’d simply been hitting the gym. On second glance, it wasn’t just his body that looked wider and stronger. One couldn’t help but wonder, like a supermarket-tabloid headline, “What Happened to John Mulaney’s Face?” This Mulaney was chiseled. His jawline, especially, was rock hard. His dimples were still there, under all the also-new salt-and-pepper scruff, but in profile he was cut like Michelangelo’s David (his face, I mean). As someone commented on Instagram, “Why does John Mulaney look like he auditioned for Wolverine or something?” (Most of these men have never confirmed any cosmetic procedures, for the record.)

Though of course, as with Ozempic, the celebrities will deny they’ve done any primping. Zac Efron, who has undergone much public scrutiny about whether or not he had work done, has said he slipped while walking in socks and shattered his jaw. Rife attributed his transformation to “delayed puberty.” Caughlin’s lawyers have suggested he no longer speak about Rife, but that hasn’t stopped the surgeon from speculating about various other male celebrities and their work. The biggest tell, he says, that a man has had a chin implant is he’s recently grown a beard (to hide the incision lines) or suddenly developed a lisp. He directed me to recent photographs and videos of Brady and Donald Trump Jr.

In the meantime, clever plastic surgeons have figured out how to market their solutions — not just chin implants but face-lifts, neck-lifts, jawline augmentations, and even fillers — toward men, who might have previously considered this women’s terrain. Almost every doctor I’ve spoken to tells me they encourage their male patients to think about getting work done in the same way they think about working out. As Dr. Jason Diamond in Beverly Hills puts it, “To me, it’s like, ‘What’s the difference, man? You’re trying to feel better about yourself so you can go kick ass in the world.’” Another provider I spoke to says, “Women are doing it for themselves; men are doing it to project something, like remaining competitive and viable in the workplace.”

Eric, a 44-year-old divorcé who works in private equity, recently got his jawline sharpened. “I want to age in a way that I control,” he says. (As Fisher tells me: “Beauty is above the jawline. Age is below it.”) Eric is speaking with me from his gym’s parking lot. “I work out six days a week. Just like you optimize your face, you optimize your body, you optimize your mind.” His new jawline cost him $20,000. “It’s a baby Lexus. But it’s sitting on my face.” His hope, he says, was to look “masculine without looking like a meathead. Now I look in the mirror and the person who’s reflected back to me is the person who I expect to be reflected back to me.”

As Jack soon discovered, a chin implant is a relatively simple procedure; the surgery, which typically lasts less than an hour, requires only local anesthesia and about a week of recovery time. Jack’s implant, made out of silicone, was about the size of forming the letter C with his thumb and pointer finger, “which I was told was a pretty large one.” He was left with just a small incision, barely noticeable, under his chin. To aid in the transformation, Caughlin advised liposuction around his neck. “It’s not like breast implants. You have to get those redone. I will go to the grave with this,” Jack tells me. He considers his new face a “business investment.”

In the end, Jack’s result is subtle, but compare his before-and-after selfies and the difference — which he thinks escaped the notice of his colleagues, or at least they didn’t say anything about it to him directly — is clear. His face no longer slopes downward. In his new post-op LinkedIn headshots, he looks happy. “For the first time, I found myself attractive,” he says. “I see myself on television and think, I like how that person looks.”

ANSWERS: 1. Aughts-era Brad Pitt 2. Henry Cavill 3. Matt Rife 4. Chris Hemsworth 5. John Mulaney 6. Zac Efron