“It’s almost hard to find an influencer without veneers now,” Apa says. When he expanded his New York City practice to include an office in Dubai in 2014, inviting the region’s Instagram stars in to get their teeth done was the primary way he built a new client base, he says: “It just completely changed the landscape of how I thought of attracting business and patients.” Apa notes that now up to 90 percent of his business in both offices comes from people who know about him from Instagram, and influencers and traditional celebrities alike seek him out. (The actress Chloë Sevigny and the reality-TV star Kyle Richards both recently appeared on his account.)

On Instagram, anything beloved by celebrities quickly finds a huge audience of normal users, hungry to experience the lifestyles of the rich and famous. “It’s mind-blowing how much influence social media has on people,” says Anabella Oquendo Parilli, a dentist and the director of New York University’s aesthetic-dentistry program for international students. While most people can afford a new lipstick or an occasional new pair of shoes, selling $10,000 worth of new teeth is something else. But social media is an environment where users expect to get a more intimate view of a person’s life, which sets the stage for influencers to recommend more than just clothing or makeup to their followers.

To meet that expectation, beauty and lifestyle influencers have created a class of Instagram-famous medical professionals such as the plastic surgeon Dr. Miami or the dermatologist Simon Ourian, who now have millions of followers in their own right. Being their patient has become a widely understood luxury good, like a designer handbag for your corporeal form, and it’s increasingly common to see cosmetic procedures advertised in the same ways as more traditional high-end status accessories on social media. A pair of Christian Louboutin shoes and a set of plumped-up lips cost about the same, and for a lot of young social-media users, they feel like similar consumer decisions.

Taking a medical procedure and recasting it as a marketable consumer good isn’t a simple process, but it’s one for which Instagram’s structure and culture work almost perfectly. It’s where you see what your friends had for brunch, one tap away from an internet celebrity showing off her new teeth. People’s ability to process those things separately just hasn’t caught up to the technology we now have at our disposal. “We use the framework we’d use for our friends and neighbors” when evaluating posts from influencers, says Duffy. “We have this expectation that social media gives us a glimpse into the ‘real’ person behind the scenes.”

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Social-media users now also live in an environment where they have far more opportunities to judge their own appearance than previous generations did. “You really get to see yourself age over however long you’ve had one of these phones,” says Apa. That creates pressure on regular users to perform to the same standards as the famous and wealthy. Those standards are aesthetic, but they’re also socioeconomic: It costs a lot of money to be that pretty. Instagram rewards people who perform beyond their economic lot in life, which spurs a whole host of purchases and can push people to less experienced, less expensive practitioners. Oquendo Parilli and Apa believe comparison photos on social media paint a vivid picture of what’s possible, but they warn that most depict work performed on someone who had good teeth to begin with. “A lot of people can take okay teeth and make them look white,” Apa says. “When there’s real complications, it becomes much more evolved and complicated, and requires much more experience.”