“I can’t remember the last time somebody asked me for big, juicy, plump lips,” says Dhaval Bhanusali, the doctor behind Martha Stewart’s ageless skin.

Several doctors say that, while it’s medically safe, they avoid using it outside emergencies or — as Simon Ourian, surgeon to Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox, and various Victoria’s Secret Angels, puts it — when “things are really grotesque.”

Alice is a pseudonym — she’s worried about retaliation from the practice, which cold-shouldered her when she complained of complications from the dissolver, which she says left her with deep gouges around her nose and mouth, rashes across her body, and pink boils over her lips.

“People wanna look more snatched without drawing attention to themselves, so they’re asking for very elegant lips and refined jawlines without a lot of volume,” says Ramtin Kassir, a Manhattan surgeon who does Snooki, some New Jersey Housewives, and my cousin.

One Los Angeles surgeon with a waiting list until 2025 offered to do my face for free “whenever you need.” Technicians would just go inside my mouth and slide a slab of fat out from under each cheek, he explained, and for $5,000, he could squirt some filler atop my cheekbones and I’d look like Bella Hadid — for a few years.

Then I took a contour stick, which I’d used from 2016 to 2019 to make my face heart-shaped, and followed the instructions of beauty influencers under the #modelcheekbones hashtag on TikTok, painting blue shadows under my cheeks.