Lights, camera, filter! In a world where cameras seem to have replaced mirrors, and social media has replaced IRL interaction, hyper-realistic, AI-driven filters have redefined how stars see themselves and, by extension, the requests they make to Hollywood dermatologists and plastic surgeons. With ubiquitous and unforgiving HD lenses that magnify otherwise imperceptible blemishes, dysmorphic technology is driving many Hollywood faces to strive to recreate their own AI-powered selfies in a virtual reality world, with flawless skin and borderline cartoon facial proportions. The truth is that what they ask for is often not humanly possible.
“These filters confuse your mind and make you think, ‘I’m only 5 percent away from looking like this filtered version of myself,’ and that’s not necessarily true,” says dermatologist Simon Ourian, whose clients include Lady Gaga, Kylie and Kris Jenner, Khloe and Kim Kardashian, and Megan Fox. “Sometimes you have to do a lot to get there. It’s a double-edged sword because patients think it has to be achieved. But I only have a certain number of tools in my toolbox. I’ll say, ‘Maybe we can get you in that direction, but we don’t have the technology or the knowledge or the science yet.’”
Ben Talley, the Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon who was behind Kathy Griffin and Denise Richards’ 2025 facelifts, agrees. “A lot of celebrities are using full AI filters on social media now, whether they’ve had surgery or not, which makes them look like a baby version of themselves,” he says. “So they come in and they want to look like that. I thank them for bringing me pictures that helped show me what they couldn’t achieve. Trying to improve and smooth every contour of the face with injections or fat grafting results in patients’ heads becoming larger over the course of a few years. But it looks better in the photo, so they keep chasing it. I say: ‘You have two choices here: look worse or do nothing.’ Now let me guide you to where I can actually take you.”
Stars and content creators who are accustomed to facing the audience behind a veil of digital enhancement can suddenly lose control of their image when a high-definition camera in poor lighting pulls back the curtain to reveal an unaltered version of themselves. Figure (A): Light mare in Vanity gallery March’s Oscars party at LACMA, where harsh, unflattering lighting on the steps and repeats made for a dazzling unveiling in unedited photos. That event — along with October’s unfiltered, close-up red carpet photos of Kris Jenner at the Los Angeles premiere of Everything is fair — fueled headlines about her widely acclaimed slip in a facelift in spring 2025. In fact, it appears to have been more of a slip of the filter.
“Chris is a cautionary tale, because after her facelift, her photos are still caught through filters everywhere,” says Los Angeles dermatologist Ava Shamban (Angela Bassett, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Yeoh, Demi Moore). “But you can’t control every single photo. I saw her at a party and thought: ‘She looks like a 70-year-old woman who’s had a good facial.’ She doesn’t look like her daughter.” Patients show me filtered photos of Kris all the time and say they want to look like her. I point out the smoothness and tell them it’s filtered. Then people don’t understand that the unfiltered cell phone photos they take enhance very small blemishes, so they look much worse than they actually are. They come in and ask to fix undetectable blemishes.
Ourian took care of Jenner’s appearance using non-surgical treatments. “When you post your own photo on Instagram, the lighting and filter are so good that the difference from the candid photo can be 50 percent or even 80 percent. That’s why people are shocked. These moments can be brutal because they strip away all the tricks. No filters, no ring lights, no editing. They become stress tests of appearance, and one photo can affect someone’s self-image for months,” he says.
A dedicated room at Epione’s Beverly Hills clinic, Ouriane Clinic, has lights placed in all corners and a camera that projects images onto a huge screen. “We evaluate faces dynamically from multiple angles, in motion and often via video,” says Ourian. “A face tested in camera looks natural in sunlight, under harsh event lighting, in HD video and in person. I move a spotlight to show them what kind of lighting can affect their face and to see where shadows are falling. This helps them understand the full cinematography of their face and helps me understand what areas I need to pull out or fill in.”
Rhonda Rand, Angelina Jolie’s longtime dermatologist, retouches every little line and dot that patients point out in their photos, telling them that smile lines are natural with movement and that most of their other perceived imperfections are simply invisible to her in natural light. “I tell them: We cannot deal with the image, we have to deal with reality,” she says.
All this focus on how patients appear in photographs led Talley to conduct in-depth studies of how smiles change over time, leading to his specialty in smile makeovers. During a facelift, he repositions the superficial muscle layers, adding support by microfat grafting, so that the skin does not pool toward the mouth and eyes.
“This has taken my patients to a place where I can make them look better in photos all the time without a filter,” he says. “If you look at pictures of my work, you’ll notice that my cheeks reflect light like crazy from any angle. I also fix droopy eyelids, Correction of upper eyelid drooping, which Expose the round eyeballs so that they reflect light. Replacing yellow fat cells under the skin, which are lost with age, makes the skin appear brighter. Look at Kathy Griffin. She smiles better, and takes better pictures.
In addition to being a prominent dermatologist, Ourian is an accomplished sculptor inspired by human anatomy. So he is an expert in creating 3D art in human form.
“There is no art more valuable than your face,” he says. “The future of aesthetics is about looking the best version of yourself in a world where the camera never goes off. God help us!”
This story appears in the July 2026 issue of The Hollywood Reporter entitled “The New Face of Hollywood.” Click here to read more.
