Does Ozempic Make You Appear Older?

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Ozempic is the weight loss sensation taking over Hollywood and the whole country. Ozempic is a popular drug that’s supposed to treat diabetes, but some are now using it to lose weight. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian are rumored to have taken Ozempic and Elon Musk has reportedly admitted to taking it, and now there is even a cosmetic condition that is blamed on taking Ozempic.

It’s called Ozempic face.

Ozempic is an injectable prescription drug that is FDA approved for the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes. Its active ingredient is semiglutide, which mimics the structure of glucagon-like peptide, and it therefore, activates its receptors, and this can prevent blood sugar levels from getting too high. It helps patients with type 2 diabetes and their blood sugar control problems, but that is not all it does.

Ozempic also slows down how fast your stomach empties food and this is called gastric emptying. If your stomach empties out food slower, you’re not hungry as often and hence, people have weight loss from it. While Ozempic is FDA approved for the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes, its sister drug, Wegovy, is FDA approved for aid in weight loss.

Now, they’re both made by the same company, Novo Nordisk, and they both have the same active ingredient, semaglutide.

In one trial at one year 63 percent of patients lost 5 or more of their body weight and 27 percent of patients lost 10 percent or more of their body weight.

So it definitely works. There’s so many people taking it, that there have actually been shortages at pharmacies for both Ozempic and Wegovy, but as popular as these medications are, there are definite potential side effects and complications.

People are reporting GI issues, nausea, and vomiting, and we have a new phenomenon that has been coined Ozempic face. This term was coined by articles in Town and Country magazine and The New York Times and in these articles, people who have taken Ozempic and have lost large amounts of weight developed issues with how they looked.

And some of them have even claimed that they no longer recognize themselves in the mirror. Some people have gone so far to claim that taking Ozempic and losing weight from it has made their face look like it’s actually melting.

So, does that mean that celebrities like Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian are going to look like this after taking Ozempic? Well, not necessarily. It’s actually pretty straightforward. Aging is a three-dimensional process. And for the vast majority of us, as we get older, we lose volume in our face. Our face becomes more and more gaunt with age.

Now, in general, the more fat that we have in our face, the younger we look. The less fat we have in our face, the older we look. With that being said, I do believe that the effects of weight loss on a person’s face is very individual.

So what can you do if you lose weight by taking Ozempic and you don’t like the loss of volume that you see in your face after the weight loss? You have two options. You can have fat re-injected into your face in a process called fat grafting or fat transfer, or you can have fillers injected into your face to re-add the volume back.

Some of the fillers that work great for adding volume back into the face, let’s say like the cheeks, are Sculptra, Restylane Contour, Restylane Lyft, and Juvederm Voluma. The benefit of adding fat via fat grafting or fat transfer is that it is your own tissue. And what sticks around can stick around for a long time… five, ten years, maybe even longer.

The drawback, however of fat grafting, is that it is real surgery, so you are quite swollen afterwards. It’s a bit unpredictable how much of that fat will stay long term. Conversely, the benefit of having filler injected into your cheeks or other parts of your face space to re-add the volume is that it’s quite easy and convenient. You don’t have to go through surgery and the treatment can be done over half an hour and then you can go back to work.

The negative of having filler injected to re-add volume is that it only lasts maybe one to two years, maybe a little bit longer. And if you’ve lost a lot of volume, it can get quite costly if you have to pay for a lot of syringes. Now with all the craze about Ozempic and Wegovy going on, there are some unscrupulous doctors and some online stores that have popped up that are selling Wegovy and Ozempic online.

Now these versions of this drug, they could be black market, or who knows what they could contain. So, if you’re thinking about Ozempic and Wegovy, you should be very, very careful. These are very powerful prescription injection medications that really should only be given under the care of a real doctor.

You don’t want to be injecting anything that you buy online into your body. Unfortunately, people are actually doing this. So instead, I encourage you to wait until you have the chance to see a real obesity specialist physician and get on real Ozempic or Wegovy, versus some of these knock off products.

Don’t take shortcuts with your health. So many people are claiming that both Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian have taken Ozempic and this is why their bottoms have gotten much smaller or appear to have gotten smaller recently.

So, if it’s not Ozempic, why are celebrities reducing the size of their butts? Just remember to eat real food, and only consider plastic surgery as a last resort.