In recent decades, aesthetic medicine has developed a new awareness of its goals and limitations. The specialist's task is not to change the appearance of a patient by applying the aesthetic models of the moment, but to enhance the qualities that make the patient unique, bringing out, so to speak, the inner beauty. IBSA has embraced this philosophy from the beginning and has given it a name: authentic beauty.
This orientation is gaining increasing acceptance but still has to overcome several difficulties, because it asks the patient to question their expectations. The results of authentic beauty are seen in the long term and require more treatments, while the desire of those who undergo aesthetic treatment is to have quick and visible solutions right away.
The difficulty is even more evident if the interlocutor is a patient who represents new needs and cultural models. This is what is happening with the Millennials, a new generation of users who, thanks to the professional and economic weight they are beginning to have in society, are rewriting the rules of the market.
Is it possible to convince a young generation, impulsive and intolerant of rules, to embrace a complex concept such as authentic beauty? This is what IBSA has tried to do, arriving at a solution that, given the target audience, is anything but obvious and predictable.
First of all, who are the Millennials? The social sciences – which define a generation as individuals who have experienced the same events in a given period – define Millennials as people born between 1980 and 2000. This is not, as we'll see, a homogeneous group, and we're better off dividing it into two segments, Older Millennials and Younger Millennials, which are characterized by radically different approaches towards technology.
Older Millennials, born between 1980 and 1990, are the first generation to grow up with the internet. Used to processing a huge flow of data every day, they know how to discriminate between useful information and spam. Above all, they detest top-down models. Instead, they appreciate those who communicate in a frank and direct way and use channels that encourage in-depth analysis and interaction, such as YouTube videos and social networks (this requires a necessary adjustment of tone on the part of doctors and opinion leaders).
These premises also apply to the relationship that Millennials have with beauty: they do not accept official aesthetic canons and believe that diversity is not a problem but a value. With regard to aesthetic medicine, they treasure the experience of their parents, who were the first mass users of this market. They know that prevention is better than cure and that it is necessary to start early. They undergo pre-juvenation treatments as early as 25 years old and promise to establish a lasting relationship with dermatologists and aesthetic doctors who will have gained their trust.
As you can see, Older Millennials do not show strong signs of discontinuity from the previous generation, their parents' generation. Instead, the Millennials born after 1990 and the generation that follows, Gen Z, born between 2000 and 2012, are very different. They are the so-called digital natives and their distinctive feature is already stated in this name.
Compared to the segment of Older Millennials, who got their first smartphone at the age of 15, an age when physical and psychological development is already partly complete, digital natives were born and raised with a smartphone in hand and are therefore completely immersed in the digital ecosystem.
This is no small distinction. Digital natives have built their own identities by looking at their own reflection on the cell phone screen and consider their electronic image to be just as real as their physical one. The difference is minimal but substantial. The cell phone camera gives back a different image from the mirror. It significantly alters the proportions of the face (it flattens the cheekbones and enlarges the nose), enhances chromatic contrasts and brings out the imperfections of the skin.
It therefore requires a complex series of adjustments, and for this purpose there are countless filters and photo editing applications available, ready to install on cell phones, which allow you to optimize your image to make it effective and compatible with social media. Girls increase the size of their eyes and lips, boys create a more strong-willed chin.
Manipulating one's image in this way seems like a harmless practice, but it's not, because it puts one's identity and acceptance by peers at stake. On the contrary, in some cases it produces a real psychological and perceptive splitting: on one side the real self, on the other the ideal self to be shared on the web. It is the phenomenon known as selfie dysmorphia.
Teens suffering from this syndrome have one obsession: to become their virtual selves. It is a desire that inevitably leads them to turn to the plastic surgeon. Will he be able to make them look like that person smiling from the smartphone?
The problem is rather delicate, because plastic surgery, especially when it comes to minors, should be practiced only to treat functional problems or very serious imperfections. The risk is then to make irreversible an operation decided on the wave of impulsiveness, or worse, just because it is fashionable.
But can you stop a flood wave with logical reasoning? In cases like these, an unexpected solution is needed that completely reshuffles the cards. This is exactly the logic that inspired MYVolution®.
