A deep dive into those non-surgery-surgeries taking over your Instagram feed:
A young woman smiles at something off camera. The lights glint off of her dark eyes and catch in the gauzy white medical headband holding back her sleek brown hair. Slowly, the photo begins to shift, melting out of shape like the bastard child of a Dalí painting and the '90s "Animorphs" TV show before resolving into a new version of her own face, slightly altered.
That doesn't make the language easy to parse, though. In fact, none of these descriptors are actually regulated; there's no standing definition for the difference between non-surgical, noninvasive, and minimally invasive techniques. "Minimally invasive procedures are often lumped in with noninvasive ones," explains dermatologist Annie Chiu.
Doctors are also quick to point out that "quick" and "inexpensive" doesn't mean that just anybody off the street can pick up a syringe and give your face a tweak. "Injectable procedures can seem easy, which often leads to a wide market saturation of people who may not be as qualified or experienced doing them," says Chiu. "For example, there are rare risks of injecting into an artery, causing tissue death, or even extremely rarely, blindness.