A few years back, I lost a significant amount of weight. It came off entirely by accident following a major unforeseen life crisis that resulted in a prolonged reduction of appetite. Almost overnight I went from being a healthy average-sized middle-aged woman to a thin one. Everyone was very complimentary, of course. But this was in 2022, back when shedding weight still seemed like an accomplishment and evidence of restraint rather than something to be bought and administered via needle and private prescription. I waited for my dress size to rebound to an eight from a four as it had in the past but this time round, for whatever reason, it did not.
Skinny might well look better in jeans than deep-fried Camembert tastes, but here’s a harsh truth: thinness isn’t kind to the middle-aged female face. And it wasn’t just my face that suffered from lack of plumpness in the post-collagen and human growth hormone-producing season of my life. I missed being a wee bit fat in certain obvious places I will leave to the imagination. I missed the curve of my hips and calves and upper arms and earlobes. Skinny in my late forties, even my feet and hands looked gaunt and tired.
I finally began to understand that old French chestnut about women of a certain age being forced to choose between her arse or her face. And why the very richest women in America have ended up looking the way they do: skeletal but also now selectively cushioned in strange sculpted lumps and bumps, injected with fillers of every conceivable sort, and some you wouldn’t want to conceive. For the first time in history the deleterious attendant aesthetic downsides of extreme thinness are a problem money and technology can – and will – solve. Even if it means harvesting the flesh of the dead. Let me explain, if you can stomach it.
The fat tissue is harvested from frozen cadavers then sterilized,preserved and stored in test tubes
The fashion for extreme thinness isn’t new. For decades, since the rise of fast, cheap food, since the poor got fat, near-anorexia has been a way of signaling that you’re ultra elite. Tom Wolfe described it best in The Bonfire of the Vanities: “The women came in two varieties. First there were women in their late thirties and in their forties and older (women ‘of a certain age’), all of them skin and bones (starved to near perfection). To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers. This season no puffs, flounces, pleats, ruffles, bibs, bows, battings, scallops, laces, darts, or shirts on the bias were too extreme. They were social X-rays, to use the phrase that had bubbled up into Sherman’s own brain.”
Wolfe goes on to describe a social X-ray’s bête noire as the “Lemon Tarts.” “These were women in their twenties or early thirties, mostly blondes (the Lemon in the Tarts), who were the second, third, or fourth wives or live-in girlfriends of men over forty or fifty or sixty (or seventy), the sort of women men refer to, quite without thinking, as girls. This season the Tart was able to flaunt the natural advantages of youth by showing her legs from well above the knee and emphasizing her round bottom (something no X-ray had).”
Traditionally, a social X-ray had no response to the round bottom of a Lemon Tart. She could only seethe, and watch her billionaire husband eye them up greedily. The wives could starve themselves into elite acceptability, but they couldn’t grow back their curves. Even when autologous fat transfers became possible (when fat tissue is extracted from one area of a person’s body via liposuction and then reinjected into areas requiring a bit of plumping up) they couldn’t take advantage of it because they had no body fat to transfer.
In the age of GLPs (Mounjaro, Ozempic etc.) many of the zero point one percent now find themselves with zero percent body fat. So what are the scrawny super-rich meant to do? Enter zombie fillers, the latest, increasingly popular non-invasive cosmetic procedure that offers the human fat of dead donors to living humans who want to “LooksMax” but lack body fat of their own to repurpose.
For women, autologous fat is most often transferred from the belly and upper arms to the lips, cheeks, breast and buttocks. Men often prefer to shift their excess tummy tissue to other body parts, most commonly pecs, biceps and calves. Fat transfers are more expensive, complicated and painful in terms of recovery time than the more commonly used fillers such as hyaluronic acid (Juvederm, Restylane, Belotero, which are made from natural sugar); calcium hydroxylapatite (a mineral compound used for contouring of the jaw and jowls); or poly-L-lactic acid (which stimulates natural collagen production and is said to last for up to two years).
On the upside fat transfers present an obvious win-win, offering an efficient and ecological use of the body’s resources. In the age of climate change, good citizens everywhere ought to recycle and reuse, right? Human fat also feels, well… human. Because it’s living tissue, it’s soft and flexible (they say) and it doesn’t migrate around the body, or require constant renewing.
The new procedure, introduced to the market in late 2025, has been gaining in popularity among the X-ray class, employs something called “cadaveric adipose tissue” – a fancy medical term for dead people’s fat. The fat tissue is harvested from donated cryogenically frozen cadavers, then sterilized, preserved and stored in test tubes whereupon it is alchemized via marketing and copyright into a yellowish custard patented as “alloClae.”
Doctors profiting from the procedure are happy to talk it up, of course. In a recent interview with Business Insider, Dr. Sachin Shridharani, a New York-based cosmetic surgeon, said his patients are opting for cadaver fat over their own transfers for breast augmentation, in spite of the eye-watering $100,000 price tag, because now that body fat is easily disappeared with a jab, corpse fat is the path of least resistance. “People are paying for the convenience,” he said, adding that he had performed more than 50 procedures using alloClae. “It’s about not having the downtime, not needing more aggressive procedures, not having an anesthetic.”
Another cosmetic surgeon to the billionaire class says that zombie fillers are just as popular with his male clients who want to enhance their abs or achieve more prominent pecs. “I have all these fit, totally ripped guys that have no fat [for liposuction].” The fat is used to fill out the giveaway wrinkles on hands and even feet. Foot-filler makes sense if you think of all the red-carpet attention on high heels. Why spend thousands on a shoe only to focus attention on a middle-aged claw?
One of Dr. Shridharani’s patients, 57-year-old CFO Gretchen Seal, raved about the convenience and ease of alloClae, which she reported using to “smooth out the edge of a breast implant and used extra product to fill out hip dips.” The procedure took under 40 minutes, which was less time than it took to prep her with numbing cream. It also required almost no recovery time. The fat cells in alloClae don’t actually contain the donor’s DNA. Even the highest status X-ray might balk at the thought of smearing her bones with someone else’s genetic code. The fat is processed in a way that removes the nucleus of the living cellular material, and it’s zapped with gamma rays to sterilize it and remove contaminants, leaving a sort of gelatinous scaffold that the patient’s own cells begin to populate. But even so, it’s entirely unclear whether the dead fat donors would have been happy to end up as a billionaire’s butt-lift.
The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) lets tissue banks collect voluntary donations from the dead for use in transplants, research, education and what’s known as “enhancements,” but many registered donors are unaware exactly what their body parts might be used for. According to the LA Times, lobbyists for “the multibillion-dollar body parts industry” helped rewrite the UAGA in 2006 to make it “easier for body parts to be harvested quickly.”
There are no brand ambassadors as yet, but a Google image search for “celebrities who use zombie filler” reveals a gallery of grotesquerie that resembles a collection of Commedia dell’arte masks.
It is unclear whether the donors would have been happy to end up as a billionaire’s butt-lift
Possible candidates include Susan Dell, the philanthropist wife of billionaire Michael Dell, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the recently revamped Emma Stone and a long list of similarly stick-thin actresses and socialites, who now sport occasional curves on their skeletal frames. Susan Dell made a rare appearance recently with her husband to announce a vast donation, and the dramatic change in her appearance, her intense thinness combined with the various anomalous lumps provoked astonished horror. Was she even the same person? No single part of her seemed untampered with but then, that’s the look. The more surgical procedures you have the better.
Also popular, for instance, is the dimpleplasty, in which the doc makes a small incision in the skin, removing some muscle and fat, then ties a suture to two cheek muscles to keep the dimple in place. Complications include bleeding, facial nerve damage, redness and swelling, infection and scarring. And all that social X-ray weight loss can lead to a loose skin around the stomach, so why not undergo an umbilicoplasty, to improve the look of a belly-button?
As cosmetic procedures go, zombie fillers are about as unpalatable and disturbing as it gets, like a science-fiction experiment that seems ripped from the pages of a dystopian thriller by Kazuo Ishiguro. Perhaps one day we will live in a world in which the poor, fat masses are factory-farmed in order to provide plumping tissue to the impossibly thin and rich? Until then, corpse flesh will have to suffice.
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