What is bone smashing? The dangerous TikTok beauty trend surgeons are warning against
WARNING: Some of the images in this report depict a violent, painful trend and may be hard to watch.
The latest TikTok beauty trend encourages young people to strike themselves in the face with a blunt object to cause fractures in their face, in hope of achieving a perfect jawline or a more physically attractive face.
A plastic surgeon told WJZ he is pushing back on this painful and dangerous trend called "bone smashing."
The trend involves young people using blunt objects to cause fractures in their faces to achieve a chiseled look.
Plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Ben Schultz. from LifeBridge Health, said there is a false belief behind the increasingly controversial trend that when bones heal, they grow stronger.
"When I heard about it, I was like 'this is the craziest thing ever since the Tide pods,'" he said.
Bone smashers justify the practice by basing it on Wolff's law, a 19th-century German surgeon who said bones adapt to stress placed on them. But Dr. Schultz says bone smashing is not backed by science.
"So, we know from healing that any scarred tissue, whether it's bone or skin or muscle, will actually only ever achieve 80% of the original strength," he said. "Which is why if people have injuries, they will often re-injure the previous sites."
Instead, he says the practice could lead to serious injury or irreversible damage.
"The face and the facial skeleton are covered with a lot of blood vessels so if you get a bleed in a particular area, it could cause airway obstruction, suffocation, blindness, or if hit a particular arteries and veins in certain areas, nerve damage," Dr. Schultz said.
A wave of videos demonstrating how to do it has amassed more than 250 million views on TikTok.
Dr. Schultz says the desire to achieve the perfect jawline through bone smashing could result in a condition.
"There is a phenomenon where bones will actually grow outside of their normal limits called an osteophyte, which is just a bony outgrowth, that's what they are trying to get here, they want to get that bone to build up."
To anyone following this trend or thinking of trying it, Dr. Schultz has this to say.
"The answer is don't. Don't do it."