You might choose a surgical or nonsurgical aesthetic treatment to change something about your appearance. When you picture the result, you might also imagine something very ordinary: getting ready, liking what you see, and getting on with your day. Feeling happier with your appearance is important, and having it take up less of your attention could matter just as much.
I recently read Dr. Steven Dayan’s The Merging Revolution Nobody Is Talking About. He explores how AI and GLP-1 medications are bringing aesthetic medicine, beauty, and wellness closer together, and he asks the industry to show how treatments affect people’s lives beyond the visible result.
The scale makes that question worth taking seriously. ISAPS estimates that plastic surgeons worldwide performed nearly 17.9 million surgical and 17.3 million nonsurgical aesthetic procedures in 2025. Meanwhile, 82% of surveyed American Society of Plastic Surgeons members reported receiving consultation requests related to GLP-1 use that year. These changes are already part of conversations happening in clinics.
My interest is in what happens between those visits. When someone changes a feature they have spent years thinking about, what happens to the routines they have built around it?
My doctoral research examines how recurring beauty and grooming practices become psychologically important in everyday life. Participants have described their routines as helping them feel calm, prepared, confident, or more like themselves. Those accounts make me interested in the role a familiar practice plays, beyond what it visibly changes.
Taking that question into aesthetic medicine opens an interesting possibility: a treatment could change someone’s relationship with a routine even when the routine itself looks the same.
Consider someone who has always applied makeup to draw attention away from a particular feature. After treatment, they might spend exactly the same amount of time getting ready, using the same products. Yet those twenty minutes could feel different. Instead of managing something they dislike, they might enjoy creating a look they want. Someone else might simplify their routine and feel relieved to have less to do.
The same behavior can serve a different purpose. Understanding that shift could tell us something important about the treatment’s value. Looking only at the finished appearance or the time spent getting ready would leave us with an incomplete account of either person’s experience.
This is where I see a contribution from consumer-behavior research: following changes in what people do, why they do it, and how necessary it feels. Someone might still love their makeup routine but feel more comfortable skipping it. Someone else might enjoy experimenting more. The question is whether the routine gives them something they value or feels like something they must complete before facing the day.
Clinical research already provides a foundation for examining these experiences. In a 2010 randomized, placebo-controlled study of 100 participants, Dr. Dayan and his colleagues reported improvements in quality of life and self-esteem among participants receiving botox treatment. FACE-Q also provides established measures of psychological and social functioning, appearance-related distress, and satisfaction with treatment.
Everyday routines may help explain how those outcomes develop. A satisfaction score can show improvement. That gives us something specific to investigate. Before treatment, ask what the person hopes will become easier and how they currently manage the concern. During follow-up, brief diaries could record what they did, how the routine felt, and how much attention their appearance occupied afterward. Pairing those accounts with established outcome measures would allow us to examine changes in satisfaction alongside changes in daily experience.
The comparison could be revealing when the visible behavior stays the same. Two people might both spend twenty minutes getting ready, but one experiences that time as enjoyable and the other as obligatory. Even for the same person, those twenty minutes could mean something different before and after treatment. The clock alone cannot answer that question.
This also connects to Dr. Dayan’s discussion of AI-informed patients. He describes people increasingly using AI to gather information and choose providers. That raises a question about how their expectations develop as they encounter more advice.
Imagine someone who begins with one concern, feels pleased with the result, and later becomes interested in several other possibilities. Returning to their original goal would help separate what the treatment achieved from what they want now. As a marketer, this distinction is important. New interest and disappointment with a previous result are different things, and the conversation should leave room to understand both.
For clinics, this research could make consultations and follow-up more specific. “What were you hoping would become easier? gives a practitioner something meaningful to revisit. It also gives a patient room to describe a benefit that may not be obvious in a photograph, or to explain why a result they like has not changed their daily experience as much as they expected.
For brands, the value would be in understanding those experiences before turning them into marketing promises. Findings about greater ease or enjoyment could inform more relevant education and communication. They could also help a business recognize success in someone who feels comfortable and has no immediate interest in another treatment.
That is the part of Dr. Dayan’s argument I want to develop further. If we are going to discuss how aesthetic treatments improve people’s lives, we can get more specific about where those improvements appear. Familiar routines offer one place to look because they bring the person back into contact with their appearance day after day.
Dania Khalife
