Freckles used to be a ‘flaw.’ Now people are paying for fake ones.

When Hailey Buchanan was a little kid in the 2000s, other kids at school teased her for having freckles. She hated it. She came to hate the freckles themselves.

Then, as we all do, Buchanan, 23, grew up; she became an aesthetician and opened her own beauty studio in Puyallup, Wash., called Face Yourself Beauty. And perhaps you can imagine how she felt when she began to see — first on TikTok and Instagram, then, this year, in her own studio — women with spotless, even, doll-like complexions determined to get freckles. Years ago they were so undesirable as to draw taunts. “Now,” she says with an incredulous laugh, “it’s, like, the trend.”