Injectable Procedures in 2025: Is Demand Still Growing?
Not in the largest survey of the field. The ISAPS count of procedures performed in 2025 records 12.8 million injectable treatments by plastic surgeons worldwide, against 15.3 million the year before, a fall of 16.2 per cent. Hyaluronic acid fell by 25.2 per cent. Botulinum toxin fell by 7.0 per cent and is still the most performed procedure in aesthetics [1].
That count covers plastic surgeons only, and in much of Europe they are a minority of the people who inject. Read it as a picture of one profession and of a changing mix, not as a measure of all demand: filler fell most, toxin held up best and skin tightening grew. Check the figures for the country where you will work, and build skills that do not depend on a single product.
Injectable counts fell for a second year running
This is not the first fall. The previous survey also recorded injectables declining, by 8.1 per cent [2]. Over a longer span the picture is steadier: against 2021, non-surgical procedures are 2.9 per cent lower, surgical procedures 25.3 per cent higher and the total 9.2 per cent higher [1]. Two declines in a row in the same survey are more than noise, and far from a collapse.
The survey counts one profession, projected from a sample
The questionnaire went to roughly 17,000 plastic surgeons, and 2,900 answered. Their replies were projected to national and worldwide totals using an estimate of how many plastic surgeons practise in each location [1]. The result is an extrapolation, not a register of treatments, and it describes board-certified plastic surgeons and nobody else.
The base also changes from year to year. The 2025 report gives separate figures for 51 locations, against 32 the year before, and notes that the wider base has affected some worldwide totals [1]. In the previous edition the number of responding surgeons almost doubled, from 1,600 to 2,975 [2]. A yearly percentage from an instrument that moves this much is less precise than it looks.
Most injectors are not plastic surgeons
The one published profile of a national injector workforce, a British study of 3,667 practitioners advertising injectable treatments, found that 32 per cent were doctors, 24 per cent dentists and 13 per cent nurses. Among the doctors on the specialist register, plastic surgery accounted for 37 per cent [3].
By our own arithmetic on those figures, plastic surgeons were roughly one in twenty of the injectors the study found. It searched clinic websites in one country, so treat the ratio as a rough guide. It still shows why a count of plastic surgeons cannot say whether treatments stopped or moved to other practitioners. If you are a newly qualified doctor, dentist or nurse, the people the survey leaves out are your future colleagues.
Filler fell most, while skin tightening grew
Not everything fell. Non-surgical skin tightening rose by 23.3 per cent, to 1.5 million procedures, and eyelid surgery rose by 16.2 per cent and remained the most performed operation in the survey. Hyaluronic acid, at 4.7 million, lost more procedures than any other category [1].
The report gives counts, not causes. Any explanation of the filler figure, however confidently offered, goes beyond the data.
How to read a growth figure before choosing what to learn
- Ask where the number comes from. Which survey, which profession it counted and which year. Without those three answers, a figure is not evidence of demand.
- Look at the longer run. One year's change in a survey whose sample shifts says less than the comparison with 2021.
- Read demand where you intend to work. National figures differ from one another far more than the worldwide total moves, and the country where you practise is the market you actually enter.
- Learn more than one category. Skills built on a single product category depend on that category; in 2025 hyaluronic acid fell by a quarter among plastic surgeons.
Whatever you learn first, learn it hands-on under supervision, and plan from the start to add other categories: the 2025 counts show how far the mix can move in a single year.
Read next
- Biostimulators: how much of the market, and when to learn
- Aesthetic Procedures by Country in Europe: Demand and Rules
- Can nurses inject botox and fillers? Country rules compared