NYC plastic surgeons flooded with post-lockdown Botox requests

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Jon Turk, MD, a facial plastic surgeon, holds a syringe used for injecting Botox in one of his exam rooms.
Stephen Yang

They’re wrinkled as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore!

New Yorkers are already flooding the phonelines of the city’s Botox purveyors — and, as doctors told The Post, it’s going to be a busy summer now that they’re opening their doors.

While the Manhattan office of Dr. Jon Turk’s plastic surgery practice remains closed, he recently opened his Woodbury location and been slammed with requests for fillers, Botox, rhinoplasties and facelifts.

“We have a massive backlog and we are working extended hours right now,” he said. “People are doing more at one time because they don’t want to come back as often. I’m right off the LIE, so people leaving the city for the Hamptons make a stop on their way out East.”

It’s enough to make Dr. Howard Sobel, whose office for aesthetic dermatology is on Park Avenue, brace for the crush when he reopens — hopefully, he said —  this week.

“Once we were able to see a tentative schedule from Gov. Cuomo for doctors to re-open, my office sent out an email to all existing patients,” Sobel said. “Within three hours, we were fully booked through July.”

Not that clients ever stopped calling — or begging — during the pandemic. “There were certainly people [during lockdown] who suggested I would be performing an essential service if I dropped by their house and got it done,” said Turk, who turned them all down. “And one even suggested a Botox party.”

“People started calling in real persistent numbers about three weeks into the lockdown,” said Sobel. “Friends wanted to know how they could meet me and get Botox and fillers and, ‘Of course, [they] wouldn’t tell anyone.’ I explained that not even my family members could secretly get Botox, fillers, or anything else.”

Some people refused to take no for an answer the first time.

“I had one high-profile patient who … proposed that she dock her boat in my backyard in Watermill where I could treat her in the privacy of her boat,” said Sobel. “I explained that it was illegal and dangerous to do. She only agreed to wait when I explained that I couldn’t do a good job on a rocking boat and she could get misplaced Botox or filler.”

Others tried to ply him with gifts. “I had several patients send me bottles of wine or food during the lockdown and, of course, the polite thing to do was to call them and thank them,” Sobel said. But when he did, there was usually an ulterior motive — asking for Botox. “They would offer to send an Uber to come and get me or meet me on their outside porch or the park bench.”

Among the initial wave of Botox warriors storming the doors are on-air personalities.

“The first group of patients are TV people — they kind of almost make an argument it’s essential for what they do,” said Turk, whose wife, Carolyn Gusoff, is a reporter for WCBS. “They came from Connecticut, New Jersey and the city.”

Things may not be moving as fast as the dried-up masses would like — “because we need to stagger [appointments] and clean, we are only seeing 15 patients at most every day,” Turk added — but the doctors are doing what they can to make sure New Yorkers’ faces will soon be as smooth as a baby’s butt.

“I would normally take three to four weeks of vacation during the summer,” said Turk. “But this summer I will be lucky to get three to four days.”