Chins Are In

Hypermasculine jawlines are all the rage in Hollywood. They only cost $12,000.

- Brock Colyar

A LITTLE OVER A YEAR AGO,Jack realized he didn’t like his face anymore. The 23-year-old from Chicago had just started working as a broadcast journalist at a local station, and being on television meant watching himself on television. “I didn’t find myself totally attractive, and, man, I wished there was something I could do to make myself attractive,” Jack, who preferred to speak pseudonymously, tells me. The more he scrutinized his face, the more he came to believe the problem was with his chin. Or, really, his lack thereof. “When I realized that my chin was the thing that was hindering my looks, I did some research,” Jack says. “I wasn’t planning to get plastic surgery.”

Online, he stumbled across Dr. Benjamin Caughlin, who has made his Chicago-based practice entirely chin-and-jaw-centric, trademarking such procedures as the “Cheekago” (buccal-fat-pad sculpting combined with jawline contouring) and “the Face BBL” (which moves fat from one part of the face to the other). Caughlin’s patients, he says, are 41 percent male these days— many of them hoping for a more chiseled look. (Last year, he claimed responsibility for the comedian Matt Rife’s jawline, a claim Rife has repeatedly denied.) During their initial consultation, Caughlin explained to Jack that while you can’t do much about, say, a big forehead—Jack had always been insecure that his was on the larger end of the spectrum—there’s absolutely something you can do about a weak chin for about $12,000. “He told me I was a perfect candidate for a chin implant,” Jack says. He went into his procedure imagining himself reemerging as an Austin Butler type. “Obviously, he’s a movie star, and I’ll never be as attractive as Austin Butler, but we have similar proportions,” he tells me.