Cuttin’ to the Chase: The Most Popular Plastic Surgery Procedures

If you have a visible imperfection on your body, chances are that there is a surgery or treatment that can correct it. With hundreds of plastic surgery procedures available  to doctors to correct a variety of issues, it may seem surprising that a few surgeries are far and away the most popular ones out there, but records show that the top five surgeries have been used more times than dozens of other procedures put together.

When it comes to the top five surgical treatments, it seems that minimally invasive is the new rage. All top five plastic surgery procedures in 2015 were, in fact, minimally invasive procedures. Ranking first of all treatments, for example, and accounting for more procedures than the other top four combined, is Botox . The popular skin smoothing treatment was performed over 6.7 million times! By contrast, collagen and other fillers, which rank second in the number of treatments performed in 2015, were only performed 2.4 million times. Rounding out the top five are chemical peel, laser hair removal, and microdermabrasion. These were all performed less than 1.5 million times with microdermabrasion only being performed around 800,000 times.

In terms of invasive plastic surgery procedures, the numbers of performed surgeries for each type of procedure are much closer to each other. The top invasive procedure is breast augmentation  with 279,143. Closely behind this popular surgery is liposuction . Lipo was performed 222,051 times in 2015. Rounding out the top five are nose reshaping surgeries, eyelid surgeries, and tummy tucks. These ranged in number of procedures from nearly 218,000 nose reshaping surgeries to just under 128,000 tummy tuck surgeries.

These numbers show how the popularity of plastic surgery has just exploded in recent years. In fact, when both surgical and noninvasive plastic surgery procedures are taken into account, there were a total of 15.9 million recorded surgeries in the United States. That breaks down to one procedure for every 16 adults!