It’s easy to blame someone with 500k followers. Harder to look in the mirror.
In Romania, aesthetic clinics have multiplied faster than pharmacies. Nose, lips, chin, cheeks, filler, botox, lipo. The list of procedures you can get done on a Tuesday afternoon in Bucharest has grown longer than the menu at a good restaurant.
And everyone knows someone who’s had something done. Or is thinking about it. Or already has and won’t admit it.
The question we always ask wrong is: who’s to blame?
The comfortable answer is influencers. They promote clinics, they post before-and-afters, they normalise procedures in front of audiences of hundreds of thousands many of them teenagers. That’s true. Partly.
But influencers don’t operate on anyone. We go to the clinic ourselves. We take out our card. We decide.
Romania has always had a complicated relationship with its own image.
There’s a cultural pressure specific to this place look good at the event, be presentable, don’t let yourself go. Your grandmother told you to comb your hair before going out. Your mother asked if you wanted to lose a little weight. Your colleagues commented on what you wore.
TikTok and Instagram didn’t invent this pressure. They amplified it and put it on repeat, 24 hours a day, directly into your phone.
And we let it in.
We followed. We saved the posts. We compared the faces on screen with our faces in the mirror. We searched “rhinoplasty Bucharest prices” at 11pm. We read reviews. We booked consultations. Some of us went further.
Not because an influencer forced us. But because somewhere, at some point, we decided our face wasn’t enough. And that decision is ours, not theirs.
That doesn’t mean influencers have no responsibility.
They do. When you promote a medical procedure without mentioning the risks, when you post before-and-afters without disclosing the image is edited, when you normalise cosmetic surgery in front of a 14-year-old audience that’s irresponsible and should be regulated.
But regulating influencers won’t cure our need for validation. It won’t resolve the question each of us asks in the mirror every morning.
That question is ours. And the answer, however uncomfortable, has to come from us too.
