Background
Instagram (Menlo Park, CA) has become a popular means of advertisement for aesthetic surgery procedures, influencing patients’ likelihood of undergoing a procedure. This study aims to explore public interest in aesthetic procedures before and after the Instagram platform began to obtain popularity via Google Trends (Google, Mountain View, CA), a platform with previously demonstrated utility for tracking interest in surgical procedures.
Objectives
We hypothesize that as a result of increased medical marketing on Instagram, there is an increase in public interest in plastic surgery elective procedures.
Methods
Trends in the United States for given search terms and volumes were gathered via Google Trends between April 2004 to January 2022. Search terms included popular aesthetic procedures based on the 2020 Aesthetic Plastic Surgery National Data Bank Statistics. The search volumes were normalized, and a bivariate regression analysis of panel data was then applied to the aggregate trendlines to determine if a statistically significant change in search volume occurred following the increase in user traffic of the Instagram platform.
Results
We found significant variations in search volume for plastic surgery procedures before and after April 2012. Blepharoplasty, Botox, brachioplasty, breast implant removal, breast reduction, brow lift, butt lift, hair transplantation, lip augmentation, male breast surgery, mastopexy, mentoplasty, otoplasty, platysmaplasty, rhinoplasty, and thighplasty (p<0.000) had statistically significant increases in search volume while buccal fat removal (p = 0.003) had a statistically significant decrease in search volume after April 2012.
Conclusions
We observed a significant increase in public interest in both surgical and non-surgical aesthetic procedures after Instagram gained popularity in April of 2012.