Why losing weight suddenly made me obsessed with my forehead
I started taking one of those popular weight-loss injections about six months ago. Everyone was talking about how it turns off the hunger switch, and honestly, it worked a little too well. I dropped about eight kilograms in a few months. But there was this weird, unintended side effect that I hadn’t really processed until I caught a glimpse of myself in a harsh fluorescent light at a department store elevator. My face looked… deflated. It wasn’t just that I was thinner; it felt like all the volume that kept my skin looking smooth had just evaporated. I suddenly started looking at my forehead and thinking it looked like a dried-out apricot. I kept reading articles about ‘Ozempic face,’ which sounds like a buzzword invented by clinics to scare you, but looking in the mirror, I felt like I understood exactly what they meant. I found myself searching for things like forehead volume fillers or fat grafting, just to get back the softness I felt I’d lost.
The endless consultation loop in Gangnam
I went to three different clinics around Sinsa and Apgujeong because I couldn’t decide if I wanted a simple filler or something more permanent like fat grafting. The first place I visited charged around 3 million won for a full face fat graft, which felt like a massive commitment. The consultant there kept talking about ‘cell survival rates’ and ‘stem cell enrichment,’ which sounds fancy, but I mostly just wanted to know if I would look like a bloated version of myself for three weeks. They kept showing me these before-and-after photos, but I found them distracting. Everyone’s face structure is so different that it’s hard to tell if the result was actually an improvement or just a change. I think I spent three hours total just sitting in waiting rooms, staring at my reflection and wondering if I was overthinking the whole thing.
Realizing the difference between expectation and recovery
My friend had a breast fat graft done about a year ago, and she told me the recovery was way more annoying than the surgery itself. She mentioned she had to wear this compression garment for weeks, and it was itchy, hot, and impossible to hide under normal clothes. Hearing that made me pause. I started wondering if I was just being vain. I was already doing jawline Botox injections every four months—usually costing me around 150,000 won per session—and that alone already felt like enough maintenance. Do I really want to add another layer of surgical recovery into my life? Some doctors told me that since I was on a weight-loss medication, my body chemistry might not be the most stable environment for fat grafting anyway. It’s strange because the clinic marketing makes it sound like a quick fix, but when you talk to the medical staff, they suddenly throw all these variables at you—like how the sudden change in my weight affects my skin elasticity.
The frustration of not knowing what is enough
I’m still at this point where I’m just staring at my face every morning, trying to decide if the volume loss is actually noticeable to other people or if it’s just me being hyper-fixated because I know I lost weight. Sometimes I think about just getting a standard filler, which is cheaper and requires zero downtime, but then I remember how many times I’ve had to go back to fix minor asymmetries. It feels like a never-ending cycle of trying to ‘correct’ things that were never actually broken in the first place. I see people getting fat grafting for their under-eye areas or even their hands, and it’s tempting to just want to ‘fix’ everything at once. But then I realize I don’t even know if I want to commit to a surgical procedure that involves harvesting fat from my thighs or abdomen. The whole process feels like I’m trading one insecurity for a medical inconvenience.
Still sitting on the fence about it
Right now, I’ve decided to stop searching for clinics for a while. I’m just focusing on keeping my skin hydrated and trying to accept that my face is probably always going to look different now than it did when I was carrying those extra kilograms. I still feel a bit uneasy when I look at photos from last year, but I’m not sure if that’s because I actually look worse or because I’m just used to a different version of myself. I’m sure at some point I’ll probably walk into one of those clinics and actually book the procedure on a whim, but for now, the sheer effort of going through the surgery and the recovery seems to be doing a good job of keeping my vanity in check. I’m not even sure if I’m waiting for a better price or if I’m just waiting for the feeling of urgency to pass.
That apricot comparison really stuck with me. It’s interesting how quickly our perception shifts when we lose volume, almost like the body remembers its original shape.