Are Celebs Really Getting Their Faces Injected With Corpse Fat?

Sitting front row at Ralph Lauren’s fall 2025 fashion show this April, actress Anne Hathaway nearly broke the internet with just her face card alone. Her skin looked quite taut—forehead wrinkle-free, cheeks high, and jawline absolutely snatched—which isn’t an easy feat for a 42-year-old, no matter how great her access is to top-tier cosmetics and skincare.

Buzz spread online, people comparing her to “a vampire,” insisting she must have gotten whatever Lindsay Lohan had done last year, and even saying it’s obvious she’s “not natural anymore.” Whether it’s Hathaway, Lohan, or even more recently, Christina Aguilera, it’s easy to feel outright ugly compared to the ageless elite in Hollywood. After all, they seem not to age while we rack up wrinkles even if we try our best to be gentle to our skin, sleep on our backs, and religiously apply bakuchiol or retinol products.

Even if they swear up and down they haven’t gone under the knife, it’s fair to speculate that most Hollywood celebs have had some sort of plastic surgery. No, we’re not their surgeons, and we can't prove anything, but let’s be honest… there’s no way they’re all just supernaturally gifted in the aging department.

We’ve all heard about deep plane facelifts, ponytail facelifts, fillers, cheek or jawline implants, and buccal fat removal. But, after Christina Aguilera recently went viral for looking no older than she did upon her Hollywood debut in a recent photoshoot for CARCY Magazine, one X user, Heidi N. Moore hypothesized that “all these celebs” have a genuinely morbid, and not well known tactic up their sleeves to age in reverse—fat transfer from corpses.

Modernity’s Answer to Reverse Aging is Here

In modern times, where the line between natural beauty and manufactured perfection blurs by the day, Hollywood’s latest age-defying secret is flying under most people’s radar. And the worst part? It’s more unsettling than it first even appears. This treatment is called Renuva, and it might sound somewhat familiar to you if you know anything about fat transfer procedures. Renuva is an injectable matrix that essentially tells your body where to spot regrow its own fat, and it’s becoming a go-to for the elite who want to turn back the clock without those tell-tale tights of fillers or surgery.

Unlike traditional dermal fillers, which can lead to the dreaded pillow face or an unnatural smoothness, Renuva has a more subtle effect. It gets marketed as a way to “restore what time has taken” by coaxing your body into regenerating those fat pads you once had in youth. So, hollow cheeks become smoother, gaunt temples get softer, and any facial deflation that naturally comes with the very normal aging process is filled.

At first glance, it sounds benign. Nay, even elegant, compared to how gruesome face-lift procedures can be. Who wouldn’t want to subtly erase a decade or two without scalpels slicing into their flesh or silicone placed under their skin?

But here’s the part that no glossy Beverly Hills clinic brochure will emphasize: Renuva is made from cadaver fat. Specifically, it is an adipose allograft that has been harvested from donated human tissue, then processed to remove cells and DNA, and purified into an injectable matrix of collagen, protein, and growth factors. In other words, it’s sterilized human fat, sourced from dead corpses, repurposed to fill and plump the living.

The tissue is reportedly screened and processed to be safe, but we can’t pretend we don’t all see the unnerving truth in front of our eyes. The treatment that’s allegedly leaving celebs looking fresh and dewy isn’t the Sunday Riley Good Genes lactic acid treatment or Rhode Skin Glazing Milk. Nope, at its core, it’s made from the flesh of those who have passed on.

It’s Subtle, Effective, and… Made From Purified Corpse Fat?

To be completely fair, it’s easy for me to see why Renuva appeals to both practitioners and patients. For women with small hollows in their faces, volume loss related to aging, or even dents in their skin from lipo, traditional fat grafting procedures can be pretty invasive and unpredictable. They require lipo to harvest fat from your own body, and once that fat is transplanted, the survival rate for those cells varies. 

Renuva boasts a less invasive alternative without surgery or downtime. And because it eventually integrates into your body as living fat tissue, the results can look and, very importantly, feel more natural than synthetic fillers. Plus, the results can last longer. If a woman has seen her youth slip away but doesn’t want super obvious work done to her face, this sort of gentle restoration is an enticing middle ground.

It’s sterilized human fat, sourced from dead corpses, repurposed to fill and plump the living.

But, Renuva isn’t a budget-friendly procedure. I mean, most cosmetic procedures aren’t in general. Traditional fat transfer to the face can range from $3,000 to $5,000 and involves harvesting fat from another part of your body. Hyaluronic acid fillers like Juvederm can cost as much as $1,200 per syringe, with popular spots on your face for age-reversal like cheeks often needing more than one syringe. And the worst part? Results really only last six to 18 months. And don’t get me started with how Botox is lauded as a budget option, yet its effects are so short-lived, and for what? Injecting literal botulism into your face?

Because Renuva uses advanced donor tissue and offers more long-term results, it’s typically priced higher than a filler like Juvederm. Depending on where you’re treating, costs can range from $2,000 to $5,000 per sesh (and it’s not covered by insurance), and you might need to come back several times for the best results. 

Are We Losing Sight of the Beauty in Growing Older Naturally?

The deeper cultural implications are also hard for me to ignore. For a generation of young women already inundated with carefully curated, airbrushed celebrity faces on Instagram, Renuva ups the ante. It's so effective, and almost imperceptibly, that us normal folks are left chasing a fast-moving target of what “natural beauty” even looks like at this point.

Actresses and influencers can swear they haven’t gone under the knife, that they haven’t had any surgical procedures, and now more than ever, they’ve got plausible deniability. After all, Renuva doesn’t involve a surgeon slicing into your face, lifting, removing, and tightening tissues, and then redraping your skin over your bone structure like a facelift does. Neither does it freeze your muscles like Botox or inflate lips like hyaluronic acid fillers do in such obvious ways. No, it simply coaxes your body to do what it did decades ago, making your aging process not only appear delayed… but perhaps even erased.

For women who value the sanctity of the human body and who may already harbor deep reservations about how modern medicine commodifies life, Renuva poses some moral questions. 

A procedure that’s built on cadaver-derived tissue may strike you as eerily familiar to bioethical issues like fetal tissue harvesting for research, organ markets that blur the line between donation and exploitation, or even the growing normalization of bodily commodification through egg donation and predatory practices in the world of surrogacy. Some people reject the use of vaccines or beauty products developed through aborted fetal cell lines (though most modern beauty products no longer require ongoing fetal tissue sourcing, thank God!), so you have to wonder if we’re dealing with a similar issue here.

Is harvesting and re-injecting cadaver fat into living people another slippery slope of treating the human body as a commodity? As raw material for commercial gain? Even with consented tissue donation, I completely understand how some women will feel super uncomfortable at the idea of smoothing their fine lines with the literal pulverised remnants of another person’s flesh. It’s not just because that thought is grotesque, it’s because it could subtly erode the reverence we hold for the human body and replace it with a concept of a toolkit of spare parts.

We’re Just Not Built to Be “Forever Young”

What I find quite concerning, beyond the obvious corpse thing, is how procedures like Renuva could worsen the cultural expectations that women’s faces should remain perfectly soft and full by the time they’re well into their 40s and 50s. Women of perimenopause and menopause age have been through a lot—many have had children and experienced fluctuating weight gain and loss as a result and have experienced a fluctuation in hormones natural to the human life cycle that leads to a reduction in facial fat. 

The rise of such subtle procedures widens the gap between everyday women who hope that consuming collagen-rich foods and beverages will provide some sense of youth as they age, and the celebrities who can pay to turn back the clock. And people have the gall on social media to praise celebs nearing their middle age for “aging gracefully.”

As Moore concluded in relation to recent celeb transformations, “Anyway none of this is 'beets' as Lohan said or 'sweet potatoes' as Olivia Munn said; it's extensive, expensive work that they paid for because their incomes depend on forever looking 26 years old in a misogynist, ageist entertainment industry.” 

Aging gracefully is not the same as biologically rewinding your fat cells with cutting-edge injectables made from cadaver tissue. It’s accepting the natural ebb and flow of womanhood.

While I’m certainly not against people electing to do what they wish with their bodies, and I do find innovations in beautification treatments endlessly fascinating, I can’t help but worry that we’re continually moving the goalposts for beauty and completely losing sight of nature. In a world that’s already rife with impossible beauty standards—whether that’s thanks to cosmetic procedures or photo filters—things like Renuva quietly raise the bar even higher for women, all while making it nearly impossible to tell when that bar has been moved.

Renuva is a miracle of modern science, and that much I cannot deny. But it’s also a reminder of how the beauty industry (and Hollywood in particular) thrives on selling women their own insecurities back to them, just packaged in more discreet and palatable ways. The question to me isn’t whether the procedure works. It’s whether the rest of us can keep up with a standard that, time and time again, vanishes just out of reach… especially when it’s built, quite literally, on the bodies of others.