The Face Only a Camera Could Love

Lights, camera, filter! In a world where cameras have seemingly replaced mirrors, and social media has replaced IRL interaction, hyperrealistic AI-driven filters have redefined how stars see themselves and, in turn, the requests they’re making to Hollywood dermatologists and plastic surgeons. With omnipresent, unforgiving high-def lenses amplifying imperceptible flaws, dysmorphia-inducing technology is driving many Hollywood faces in hot pursuit of re-creating their AI selfie IRL, complete with unblemished skin and borderline cartoonish facial proportions. The truth is, what they’re asking for is often not humanly possible.

“These filters mess your mind into thinking, ‘I’m only 5 percent away from looking like that filtered version of myself,’ which is not necessarily true,” says dermatologist Simon Ourian, whose clients include Lady Gaga, Kylie and Kris Jenner, Khloé 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 should be achievable. But I only have a certain number of tools in my toolbox. I’ll say, ‘Maybe we can get you toward that direction, but we just don’t have the technology or the knowledge or science yet.’ ”

Ben Talei, the Beverly Hills facial plastic surgeon behind the 2025 facelifts of Kathy Griffin and Denise Richards, agrees. “So many celebrities are using full-on AI filters on social media now, whether they’ve had surgery or not, that make them look like a baby version of themselves,” he says. “So they come in and want to look like that. I thank them for bringing in photos that help me show them what they cannot achieve. Trying to perfect and smooth every contour of the face with injectables or fat grafting leads to patients’ heads getting larger and larger over the course of a few years. But it looks better in a 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 get you.’ ”

Stars and content creators accustomed to facing the public from behind a veil of digital enhancements can suddenly lose control of their image when one ill-timed snap by a high-def camera in bad lighting pulls back the curtain to reveal an unaltered version of themselves. Exhibit A: the light-mare at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in March at LACMA, where harsh, unflattering lighting on the step-and-repeat made for garish unveilings in unedited photos. That event — combined with unfiltered, up-close red carpet photos in October of Kris Jenner at the L.A. premiere of All’s Fair — fueled headlines about her widely acclaimed Kim-twinning spring 2025 facelift slipping. In reality, it appears to have been a slip of the filter.

“Kris is a cautionary tale because, after her facelift, she was still shot through filters everywhere,” says Los Angeles dermatologist Ava Shamban (Angela Bassett, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Yeoh, Demi Moore). “But you can’t control every single image. I saw her at a party and thought, ‘She just looks like a 70-year-old who had a good facelift. She doesn’t look like her daughter.’ Patients show me filtered pictures of Kris all the time and say they want to look like her. I point out the softness and tell them she’s filtered. Then people don’t understand that unfiltered cellphone photos of themselves enhance tiny little imperfections, so they look much worse than they are in reality. They come in asking to have undetectable flaws fixed.”

Ourian has tended to Jenner’s visage with nonsurgical treatments and says, “When you post your own picture on Instagram, the lighting and filter are so good that the difference from a candid photo might be 50 percent or even 80 percent. That’s why it shocks people. These moments can be brutal because they remove all the tricks. No filters. No ring lights. No editing. They have become stress tests for appearance, and a single photo can influence someone’s self-image for months.”

A dedicated room at Epione Beverly Hills, Ourian’s clinic, has lights positioned at all angles and a camera that projects images onto a huge monitor. “We evaluate faces dynamically from multiple angles, in motion and often on video,” says Ourian. “A camera-tested face looks natural in sunlight, under harsh event lighting, on high-definition video and in person. I move a spotlight around to show them what kind of lighting could affect their face and to see where shadows land. It helps them to understand the whole cinematography of their face and me to understand which areas I need to pull or fill.”

Rhonda Rand, Angelina Jolie’s longtime dermatologist, pushes back on retouching every little line and spot that patients point out in their photos, telling them that smile lines are natural with movement and that most of their other perceived flaws are simply not visible to her in natural light. “I tell them, ‘We cannot treat a photograph; we have to treat reality,’ ” she says.

All this focus on how patients look in photos has led Talei to do in-depth studies of how a smile changes over time, resulting in his specialty of smile modulation. During a facelift, he repositions the superficial muscle layers, adding support with micro fat grafting, so the skin no longer bunches toward the mouth and eyes.

“This has taken my patients further to a place where I can make them look better in photos all the time without a filter,” he says. “If you look at photos of my work, you’ll notice that the cheeks reflect light like crazy from any angle. I also do ptosis repair, correcting a drooping upper eyelid, which expose the round of the eyeballs so they reflect light. Replacing yellow fat cells under the skin, lost with aging, makes skin look more luminous. Look at Kathy Griffin. She is smiling better, photographing better.”

Beyond being a star dermatologist, Ourian is an accomplished sculptor whose work is inspired by human anatomy. So he is something of an expert at creating three-dimensional art in human form.

“There is no more valuable art than your face,” he says. “The future of aesthetics is about looking like the best version of yourself in a world where the camera never turns off. God help us!”

This story appears in The Hollywood Reporter’s July 2026 issue “The New Face of Hollywood.” Click here to read more.