S1 EP8: Social Media “Influencers” Need to Be Stopped…

We know TikTok is a dark, slightly unhinged place, and things happen there that shouldn’t. The other day, one of us was scrolling and came across an American influencer with a huge following. She had bought anti-wrinkle product on the black market and was injecting herself at home, telling her followers in the video that there’s no need to pay a practitioner when you can do it yourself.

That is not okay, and it needs to be regulated properly. In Australia, we’re heavily restricted in what we as registered nurses are allowed to say about our own industry, and yet someone with no training or qualifications can get hold of a prescription-only product from an unregulated source and tell thousands of people to do the same thing at home. If you want to hear how badly that can go when it’s done by someone who isn’t a registered practitioner, we told a real story about it in what happens when influencer trends go wrong a few episodes back.

Here’s what gets us. In Australia, registered practitioners like us are so heavily regulated that we’re not even allowed to talk about certain treatments on our own social media or website, and we can’t be photographed holding a syringe.

Meanwhile, influencers with zero medical background are out there saying whatever they like about treatments and ingredients they clearly don’t understand, with no consequences at all. We’ve watched people mispronounce basic skincare ingredients while reading straight off a brand’s script, and it’s infuriating to watch. If you actually want accurate information about what a treatment involves, a proper facial aesthetics consultation with a registered nurse will always tell you more than a script written for someone with a following.

We don’t do freebies. Between the two of us, we’ve been injecting for well over a decade, and we have never once given a client a free treatment in exchange for a post, and we never will, because that’s not who we are.

But we’ve watched plenty of other clinics do exactly that, and it’s created a strange trend: influencers who’ve quietly kept up their facial volume or their lip aesthetics for years suddenly posting “doing my Botox for the very first time” content, when we both know for a fact that isn’t true.

It became even more obvious during the brief TikTok ban in the US, when a wave of influencers suddenly came clean about surgeries and treatments they’d been hiding for years, purely because they thought the app was about to disappear and it no longer mattered. Watching that unfold was wild. It made us wonder how many long-term followers found out their favourite influencer’s “natural” look wasn’t natural at all.

The correlation between social media, influencers and mental health is huge, and it doesn’t get talked about seriously enough. It gets a brief mention on the news every so often and then the conversation dies down again.

What’s actually happening is compare and despair. People scroll and measure themselves against someone else’s body, skin, hair or lifestyle, without knowing that what they’re looking at has been filtered, edited or staged. Of course that leaves you feeling like you’re falling short of something, because you’re comparing your real life to somebody else’s highlight reel.

We didn’t grow up with social media the way kids do now, but we still grew up surrounded by unrealistic standards, just through magazines and the fitness influencers of the time instead. One of us remembers a well-known fitness personality’s workout guide doing the rounds when we were barely teenagers, and how many of our friends tried to follow along with eating plans that were nowhere near appropriate for a growing body.

Looking back now, it’s honestly sad. As young teenagers we cycled through fad diet after fad diet, and at least one of those attempts ended with a health scare at school. Nobody should be thinking about their body that way at thirteen or fourteen, and we say that as two people who lived it. What we didn’t realise at the time is that the people we were trying to look like were, in a lot of cases, doing nothing but training and eating for a living. That’s not a fair comparison for anyone with an actual job, actual kids or an actual life.

A lot of us are now dealing with something that actually has a name: Snapchat dysmorphia. Clients come in holding up a filtered photo of themselves and ask to look like the filter, not realising it has smoothed their skin, lifted their cheekbones and reshaped their jaw into something that isn’t actually their face. A proper facial balance and harmonisation conversation with a nurse starts from your real anatomy, not from a beauty filter.

It’s worth remembering that beauty standards have shifted dramatically over time, and not always toward something more attainable. Marilyn Monroe, a genuine beauty icon, was reportedly a size 14 to 16. Compare that to the ultra-lean look that’s trending right now, alongside the sudden rise of weight loss injections as a shortcut, and it’s clear the goalposts move constantly. If something genuinely bothers you and you want to address it properly, that’s a completely valid reason to see a professional. What worries us is people being pushed toward extreme measures by content from people with no qualifications to be giving that advice in the first place.

AI, AUTHENTIC BEAUTY & FINAL THOUGHTS

Even editing apps have gotten out of hand. We’ve played around with one that can reshape a face and add length to hair in a few taps, and it drove home how easily a photo can be turned into something that isn’t real at all.

Then there’s AI. We came across an influencer account with millions of followers and genuinely stunning photos, and the account is entirely AI-generated. Not a real person. People were commenting, asking her out, offering to send her money, completely unaware. That’s genuinely unsettling, and it’s only going to get more common.

Even the aesthetics industry itself isn’t immune. Overseas, we’ve already seen the first AI machines performing basic cosmetic treatments like lashes and nails. Where all of this ends up, we honestly don’t know. What we do know is that the answer isn’t to chase whatever a filtered photo or an algorithm tells you that you should look like. That’s the whole difference between scrolling and an actual conversation, which is what Biba’s clinical approach has always been built around. If something about your skin or your face genuinely bothers you, come and talk to a real person about it, not a comment section.

We’d love to hear from you about anything you want us to bust the myth on next, so leave us a comment and let us know. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next week.