Why people are losing friends after getting plastic surgery

In May 2023, 24-year-old content creator Maya Rigby got a revision rhinoplasty that she considers her “actual nose job”. “I have the nose I want now, and the entire process was not something that I shied away from talking about with my friends,” she says. Only one close friend, in particular, started acting strange towards Rigby after the procedure. “We’d been friends for two years at this point, were super close, and even travelled together,” she says. “But after I got my nose done, something immediately shifted in our friendship. Suddenly, she was getting more annoyed and frustrated with me,” Rigby says. Two months after the rhinoplasty, they were no longer on speaking terms.

Rigby posted about the friendship breakup on TikTok last month, saying that the unintended “perk” of getting a rhinoplasty is that it filters out “fake friends”. “She would always say ‘good for you, but I could never,’ and I never knew what she meant by that,” says Rigby. “Then she’d bring my nose up in front of new people and say something like ‘rhinoplasty queen’”. The comments on Rigby’s TikTok video are filled with similar stories – people swearing their friends stopped inviting them out after their BBL or dropped them after they lost a drastic amount of weight. While there are a plethora of reasons why those relationships could have imploded (and the people on the other end likely swear their friend switched up after surgery), cosmetic procedures seem to be a final tipping point for many.

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After spending months mulling over what happened in the final months before her friendship breakup, Rigby concluded that a shift in confidence and insecurity was ultimately at play. “There’s the term energy vampire, where a friend enjoys feeding on our energy when we are not feeling our best,” she says. “Then, when you become more confident, they are no longer getting what they want from the relationship anymore.” This, says Rigby, can apply to plastic surgery but also to getting a new job or finishing your master’s degree. With this in mind, stories like Rigby’s may be less about plastic surgery itself and more down to a cultural avoidance of discussing (perfectly normal) feelings of jealousy within our relationships. On TikTok, this looks like people expressing frustration because they’ve saved for breast augmentation for 20 years, but then their best friend booked their appointment before them, or people feeling insecure because all of their friends got BBLs. Now they feel like they “look like a pole next to them”.

Melissa Doft, a double board-certified plastic surgeon in New York, says cosmetic work can improve a patient’s confidence. “I can see how somebody who wasn’t confident in their friendship might feel more intimidated [in seeing the results],” she says. “Something they perceived as a flaw in someone maybe felt like an evening of the playing field, but that flaw is no longer there.” Then, there’s the added fact that plastic surgery is expensive and not accessible to everyone (a wealth gap in friendships can cause tension across relationships). While experiencing jealousy within a relationship doesn’t have to result in a permanent divide, the catch is that both parties must admit and process the feelings (something that’s made difficult by jealousy being deemed an embarrassing and negative emotion) and have open conversations to move past the potential block.

@shopthewildtexan Am I mad, no, its a joke. But am I jelly, absolutely 😩 #besties #bestfriends #pov #relatable #plasticsurgery ♬ Originalton – Chat Music

Logan, a 24-year-old dancer in Las Vegas, swears her ex-friend became jealous of her after her breast augmentation surgery in July 2023. “She told me I’d look bad with them and not to get them,” she says. “But, now that I have them, she tells everyone I used her as the inspiration for them (I did not).” According to Logan, her procedure brought out an underlying issue of insecurity in her ex-friend. By the time she noticed what was happening, it was too late to repair the relationship. “If you end up looking really good, it can just make an insecure friend even more insecure, bringing those insecurities to light,” she says. Despite not speaking to her friend since last year, Logan says she would like her friends to weigh in if her plastic surgery was “getting excessive”. “But just getting my boobs done? That’s nothing,” she says.

It’s also impossible to ignore that most people who seemed to relate to Rigby’s video were young women. Unfortunately, the patriarchal lens of pitting women against each other (especially when it comes to attractiveness) may cause some friendships to be collateral damage. As people post proudly that they got a BBL before the rest of their friend group and even call people without surgery “plain Janes”, there are cases where the friend that’s undergone major plastic surgery starts playing into the idea of being in physical competition with a friend (and winning because of the procedures). There are even studies that show that treatments like Botox impact the relationships of the patient because the neurotoxin itself can limit facial mimicry and empathy. For Tyler (whose name has been changed for the sake of anonymity), their best friend getting a BBL meant her losing a partner in all the activities they used to enjoy doing together, like going to the gym daily and eating out once or twice a week. “After her surgery, I was there for her, but she stopped being there for me,” they say. “Everything became about what she wanted to get done next, and we only saw each other every few months.”

If you end up looking really good, it can just make an insecure friend even more insecure, bringing those insecurities to light.

Plastic surgery has become somewhat of a divisive and politicised issue. The online fights over whether cosmetic procedures are empowering for women or if they are creating an impossible standard for young girls are, no doubt, bleeding into friendship conversations. As it turns out, getting a BBL or nose job can not only impact your current relationships but also shift your approach to making new friends. “My experience taught me not to share things right away with new friends because I don’t want to give people the wrong idea,” says Rigby. “It has a bad reputation because you’re changing how you look to fit a beauty standard, but I also don’t want to be judged for it.” The oxymoron is, according to Rigby, even the most judgemental of friends still support celebrities who have undergone the same procedures. “I understand how plastic surgery can be viewed as a complicated cultural issue as a whole,” she says. “But it’s hard to maintain a friendship with someone who doesn’t see me for me.”