Why are people pumping their bodies with fat from corpses?

There’s a buzzy new diva in the world of cosmetic injectables and she’s quick, easy to recover from … and came from a dead body.

Indeed, people are injecting themselves with fat from corpses in order to pump up their physiques, and it’s catching on more than you would think. “It’s a gamechanger,” Dr Douglas Steinbrech, surgeon at Alpha Male, a Manhattan plastic surgery clinic that’s become popular for this procedure, told the Guardian. “[Recipients] don’t need surgery. They don’t need general anesthesia. They don’t have recovery, and the pain from all that.”

Kooky cosmetic procedures such as foot filler, vampire facelifts and even pokertox (injectables that help poker players suppress facial expressions to avoid giving away their tells) are more common and accessible than ever. But the entry of cadaver fat into this ecosystem raises ethical questions – and it reveals a lot about our own anxieties about ageing and mortality.

When individuals donate their organs, tissue banks often collect abdominal fat cells, too. Companies then purchase that fat from the tissue banks and process it for cosmetic use. It’s not the first time that donated tissue has been used for cosmetic surgery, but the process has fueled longstanding concerns about whether donors know how their remains will be used. In 2012, for instance, NPR reported that tissue bank solicitors only told potential donors that their tissue might be used for cosmetic surgery 29% of the time. (Tiger Aesthetics, whose injectable alloClae has been available since early last year, says the company ensures all its tissue is “consented to for aesthetic use”. A representative for MTF Biologics, which developed a means of a reusing fat about a decade ago, says the same.)

Meanwhile, it’s impossible to ignore how our queasiness about these procedures reflects our conservative attitudes toward cosmetic procedures. As ubiquitous as it is these days, we’re still not totally accepting of cosmetic surgery, and the moral hierarchy of elective vanity procedures versus life-saving surgeries means the real issue isn’t that we’re stripping dead people for parts, it’s what we’re using those parts for.

The aesthetics of capitalism play a big role in why we’ll likely see more and more people seeking out this procedure. The downtime is reportedly minimal, and many are opting for it because that means they don’t lose any productivity hours. Business Insider spoke to plastic surgeons who have completed a combined 75 procedures with alloClae since it became available early last year, and they described “wealthy executives and corporate types, booking 6am visits so they could make it to work by 7”, and using the filler to look better in their work clothes.

The politics of beauty in the west continue to shape who is allowed to be successful. “Zombie filler” supports a lifestyle with which wealthy people can make significant changes to their appearance with no pesky recovery time to interrupt the capitalist processes that demand the physical perfection they’re seeking.

It’s also interesting to see how all of this intersects with other health and wellness trends. The GLP-1 boom is fueling demand for alloClae, because the dramatic weight loss caused by drugs like Ozempic has left some of its users wanting to put the fat back on in certain areas. Everybody wants to be skinny, but nobody wants a hollow face or a flat ass, and so we’ve found ourselves in a vicious feedback loop in which people are taking measures to lose weight, and then circling back to the doctors’ office when they’ve lost too much of it.

Yet the biggest irony in all of this is how it illuminates our own anxieties about mortality. Nobody wants to get old, and they damn sure don’t want to look it. Anti-ageing is a billion-dollar business and the people seeking cosmetic procedures are skewing younger and younger. In our pursuit of immortality, we’ve come back to the thing we were running away from to begin with: death.

But it’s not the cadavers that are scariest; it’s our increasing rejection of our bodies’ natural processes, and the ways we’re willing to commercialize everything in order to feed that rejection. We’ve created a society where everyone is insecure about their bodies and the goalpost of beauty and physical fitness moves constantly. So if consenting to being an organ donor means one day your stubborn belly fat could end up rounding out someone else’s botched boob job, then so be it.