If 2025 can be characterized as the year of natural looking facelifts and salmon sperm, what does 2026 hold in terms of facial plastic surgery and aesthetics?
The answer, in part, is more of the same to some extent.
“As we head into 2026, we can extrapolate from what we’ve been seeing on the rise over the last 12 to 18 months. The through line is relatively clear: less is more, smaller, more subtle, more beautiful, more aesthetic and less done,” said New York-based plastic surgeon Dr. Adam Kolker.
To Kolker, this means restoring volume lost in the natural aging process. While the overdone look has led to filler fatigue, fat transfers, though around for a long time, will continue to rise in popularity.
“Over the last few years we’ve come to understand it a lot more clearly. When you’re doing a restoration of the anatomy, you cannot ignore the volume,” he said. “We can spend hours talking about different techniques. We talked about SMAS techniques and deep plane techniques. They all, for the most part, do about the same thing. It’s restoring that inverted cone of youth, taking the volume away from the lower face, but it doesn’t always get it into the cheek area and the upper face and the zones of the face that people have lost it. So fat transfer is absolutely invaluable, complementary to any facial aesthetic surgery, but also more of a structural solution on its own, rather than just a cosmetic add on. That’s an important change.”
A big factor continuing to drive these trends is the increased use of GLP-1s, which can lead to the so-called ozempic-face. “We see that even with a small to moderate amount of weight loss that people are actually losing some of that youthful volume,” said Kolker.
In derm aesthetics, the use of salmon sperm, known as PDRN, will continue to be prevalent with new treatments like Ante Age’s P.E.A.R.L. Advanced Cell Signaling System, which combines exosomes, PDRN, antioxidants, growth factor and amino acid in a singular, in-office micro needling treatment.
Dr. Morgan Rabach, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City, said: “Microneedling itself provides the skin with an opportunity to regenerate itself. In order to really get the maximum effect, we add the exosomes, because this a unique opportunity for us to use the brakes in the skin barrier to flood the skin with all these regenerative things. Usually our skin barrier is pretty tight. It really doesn’t let anything in and so in these moments post treatment, there’s so much regeneration that takes place. We’re going to be seeing more and more of these.”
Despite filler fatigue and the rise of regenerative treatments, she believes filler will gain some momentum in 2026.
“This filler hatred is going to swing back in 2026. The bad filler that we see has just been really over identified in the media, but all the good fillermis so elegant, and there’s going to be a trend back for filler,” she said. “The trend and the style of filler is going to be more natural, and we’re going to see a lot more of these types of exosomes, EZ Gel, PRP mixed with more biostimulatory molecules like Sculptra, Radiesse, even hyaluronic acid filler. The combination of these all together go with this trend of people trying to optimize their healing, their aging and keeping their collagen, their elastin, activated.”
