Yes, seriously. Apparently some dudes are so afraid of looking "woke" that they ape Jay Leno's chin.
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A little over a year ago, Jack realized he didn’t like his face anymore. The 23-year-old from Chicago had just started working as a broadcast journalist at a local station, and being on television meant watching himself on television. “I didn’t find myself totally attractive, and, man, I wished there was something I could do to make myself attractive.” Online, he stumbled across Dr. Benjamin Caughlin, who has made his Chicago-based practice entirely chin-and-jaw-centric, trademarking such procedures as the “Cheekago” (buccal-fat-pad sculpting combined with jawline contouring) and “the Face BBL” (which moves fat from one part of the face to the other). Caughlin’s patients, he says, are 41 percent male these days — many of them hoping for a more chiseled look. (Last year, he claimed responsibility for the comedian Matt Rife’s jawline, a claim Rife has repeatedly denied.)
During their initial consultation, Caughlin explained to Jack that while you can’t do much about, say, a big forehead — Jack had always been insecure that his was on the larger end of the spectrum — there’s absolutely something you can do about a weak chin for about $12,000. “He told me I was a perfect candidate for a chin implant,” Jack says. He went into his procedure imagining himself reemerging as an Austin Butler type. “Obviously, he’s a movie star, and I’ll never be as attractive as Austin Butler, but we have similar proportions,” he tells me.
What men are aspiring toward, Dr. Lara Devgan, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon, tells me, is what she describes as the “Disney Prince or Superman aesthetic.” And they often have an actor in mind. Among the celebrities most cited as inspiration in recent years, surgeons say, are Henry Cavill (famous for playing Superman) and a “young Brad Pitt.”
Dr. Douglas Steinbrech, a surgeon in New York, makes a point to count his top-requested faces annually. Last year’s included Chris Hemsworth, Ryan Gosling, David Beckham, and Cristiano Ronaldo, all of whom have especially snatched jawlines. Dr. Garth Fisher, of Extreme Makeover fame, believes men are more hesitant about upper-face procedures lest they wind up looking like Robert Redford, Kenny Rogers, or Matt Gaetz, who has what is referred to in the industry as a “Spock brow.”
This is all coming at a time when — after a brief era in which men in the public eye flirted with androgyny — rugged masculinity is back in style. “People want to see men. Fey is out. Men are in,” one New York talent manager told me recently. Even Timothée Chalamet isn’t really a twink anymore.