In this send:
Dr. Konstantin Vasyukevich, under eye filler, Restylane, Ali Sheets, PA-C, RealSelf, Cephalexin, Hydrocodone, baby shampoo, bromelain, The Row, gua sha, Omnilux, dry January…
Welcome to High Touch. Today we’re talking about my plastic surgery—the questionable cosmetic decisions I made that brought me there, the doc I went to, the acute and long-term healing process, lots of progress pics—but before we get into that, a few things spotted, tested, heard in the High Touch universe this week:
A touch of High Touch…
Enhanced Games, the “steroid Olympics” competition (which friend of HT Chris Gayomali chronicled in his excellent podcast SuperHuman), went down this weekend, breaking one world record and minting champions out of three, uhhh, non-enhanced athletes. Parent company Enhanced simultaneously rolled out the Enhanced Shop, which includes testosterone and semaglutide injections prescribed via its owned telehealth arm and a topical skincare line that includes a $140 GHK-Cu cream, an analog of field varietal copper-peptide serums like this $32 one from The Ordinary. The common denominator appears to be: ‘tides, bro.
“1%” jokes notwithstanding (that’s how biohacker billionaire Bryan Johnson refers to his girlfriend Kate Tolo’s vagina), the couple’s announcement to enter the female longevity field through n=1 research could easily break past memedom. Traditional science has an abhorrent track record on conducting studies in women, and with their initial focus set on endometriosis, we can already say at the very least it’s good to have it back in the conversation.
And some Touch-y brands are running Memorial Day sales: EightSleep’s “biggest sale of the season”; Hume, maker of smart scales, is 45% off with MEMORIAL45; Plunge is doing 25% off saunas and 30% off cold therapy tubs. Lastly, a personal fave—HigherDOSE’s 20% sitewide sale with MDW2026 (and 25% off bundles).
I got lower blepharoplasty plus fat transfer and CO2 laser in January of 2024, at a point when my under eyes were worse-than-baseline.
Some backstory: 8 or so years prior, when I first started working at InStyle, a plastic surgeon’s PR (Dr. Konstantin Vasyukevich) offered me free under-eye filler in exchange for using him as an expert source in upcoming coverage. This kind of thing happens all the time. I had genetically hollow and dark eye bags, so I accepted. All was par for the course—the change was subtle and I kind of forgot I had even done anything after a while.
In 2022, the Restylane he had injected over half a decade earlier became encapsulated, i.e. hardened and bulging under the skin. This can happen after a virus like a flu (or even one you don’t otherwise notice) passes through you, which I suspected to be the case: A dot of filler I had added to my jaw to even out the line between my chin and cheek (called the sulcus) at an injector’s office more recently (Ali Sheets, PA-C, when she was at Center Aesthetic) had also suddenly hardened and bulged out. Neither of my past injectors had done anything improper, it’s just the complex nature of filler, which the industry is only starting to recognize after many years of heralding it as low-risk and short-lived.
I ended up having to get the stubborn filler in all three sites dissolved over something like five sessions. Hyaluronidase is super traumatic to the area, and the whole ordeal left the skin under my eyes really baggy and thin. Some months later, I took a selfie on an overcast day and was so alarmed that I decided I had to do something about it. Realistically, the aging process also played a role.