Three to four times a day, Chris Bustamante schedules time to talk to his clients about how they want their penis to look.
His midtown Manhattan clinic, Lushful Aesthetics, offers plenty of what Bustamante calls “bread-and-butter” beauty services like facial fillers and chemical peels. Yet the true growth of his business lies in penis filler. In 2024, the procedure accounted for over 40% of Lushful Aesthetic’s $3 million revenue.
They’re not alone.
Interest in penis enlargement has been booming. Multiple cosmetic surgeons told Allure in 2023 that penis filler is now their most popular procedure. Dr. David Shafer, a plastic surgeon in New York, told GQ in 2023 that his penis filler clients have grown from one or two a week to four or five a day. He now dedicates an entire floor of his clinic strictly to penis filler services.
When Bustamante, a doctor of nursing practice, opened his clinic in 2022, the only male enhancement service he offered was “Shockwave Therapy and P-Shot,” which uses plasma and vacuum pump therapy to promote longer erections.
Now, he told Business Insider he does about “three penis fillers a day.” His clients — typically professional men in their 30s, 40s, and 50s — pick from a menu of highly specific (and patented) enhancement procedures. They can get a thicker girth (“Girth Enhancement”), a larger scrotum (“ScroFill”), or to just be more of a shower than a grower (“ShowTox,” which uses Botox to relax muscles in the penis and retain more blood when flaccid).
Many of his male clients add on body enhancement services like “instant BBLs,” non-surgical butt lifts using high volumes of filler, he told BI.
Bustamente’s experience reflects the recent rise in men getting beauty treatments. Between 2019 and 2022, non-invasive cosmetic procedures like fillers and Botox increased in male patients by 253%. As he sees it, it’s all part of a general trend toward perfection among high-flying men.
“They’re usually competitive, they want to be the best.”
The men who want everything bigger
Bustamante described three main categories of male enhancement clients. There are sex workers. There are young professionals or men in their 30s and 40s who hold jobs in more creative fields like marketing. The rest, roughly half of the clients, are “high-power money-makers” — finance and real estate men in their 40s and 50s.
While most of them have average or even naturally large penises to begin with, it doesn’t matter. These clients want to be “the biggest guy in the room,” he said.
One recent client of Bustamante’s, who works in wealth management, spent around $150,000 in three months on instant BBLs ($16,000 for 80 units or syringes), girth enhancement, and scrotum filler (each $13,500-$16,500 for 20-25 units). He did each treatment three times, building up because “he wants it to be bigger,” Bustamante said. More commonly, patients will spend around $50,000 over the course of one to two years, adding more filler every six months.
Bustamante said he’s had clients ask him, while he was injecting them, if this is the most filler he’d ever used. When Bustamante said he’s gone higher, they’d ask him to match that number on the spot. Some clients have ended up with penises over 7.5 inches in circumference — greater than their length.
Bustamante has limits to what he’ll do. “You have to look out for body dysmorphia,” he said. One client he declined was a bodybuilder who used a penis pump, a common treatment for erectile dysfunction, for 40 minutes a day — going over the safe limit of 30 minutes a day. Overuse can cause swelling and severe damage, and he ended up scarring his penis, making it unsafe to inject filler. (Because of the scarring, it also wouldn’t have looked good, Bustamante said).
If he notices clients booking frequent appointments to add filler, he’ll insist on waiting six months before he does anything else. “We’ve done a lot. Enjoy it,” he’ll tell them. “Don’t go somewhere else and try to do something and have them mess it up.”
When penis filler goes wrong
The rise in penis filler popularity also means Bustamante’s seen more requests for revisions after clients experienced side effects like lumping, heavy bruising, and scarring from other clinics. About 25% of his new clients come in for revisions, so much so that he officially added it as a service.
Some of the tweaks are simply cosmetic — perhaps a provider injected a penis when it was flaccid, and couldn’t predict how big, small, or wonky it would look when erect. (Bustamente uses Trimix, a medication that gives men an artificial erection, before injecting.)
Other revisions are more involved. One client came to Bustamante after getting penis filler at clinics in California and Texas. In his last appointment, his penis ended up so bruised, it was black. He didn’t have sex for a year. Bustamante fixed it by first dissolving all the filler and re-injecting him.
Part of the problem, Bustamante said, is that some injectors are not properly versed in the complexity of penile procedures. They may start their careers in cosmetics, performing facial filler services, and tacking on penis filler, even though it’s more complicated and can be counter-intuitive.
For example, with facial filler you can inject a little bit at a time, slowly shaping a new look, he said. You don’t want to do that with a penis, Bustamente said, because the penis needs to fully heal before adding more. Short bursts of filler can cause inflammation, which leads to swelling, filler migration, lumps, and pain. Instead, Bustamante prefers to inject most of the filler at once, checking in with patients three weeks later, when they should be about 90% healed.
“It’s a whole different anatomy and requires really extensive experience,” Bustamante said.
The healing process often involves some swelling and light bruising, but should never involve severe pain, nor should bruises be nearly black, he said.
Business continues to boom
Business continues to grow — Lushful has scaled $1 million each year since it opened. Bustamante believes having more clients makes him better at what he does. “My technique is ever-evolving,” he said. He has methods for different penis shapes, whether they have a lower circumcision line or thicker foreskin, because of how the filler settles.
“If you’re a hyper-critical artist, you’re always looking at how you could do things better,” he said. “When I do my mom’s Botox, I’m like looking at her, like, ‘OK, that looks good.’”
Being in a major metropolis like New York City pays dividends, too. He has returning clients fly in from other states where experienced penis filler injector pickings are slimmer — for now, anyway.
Paying tens of thousands for the perfectly crafted package might sound like a niche interest. At least anecdotally, more men do it than they care to share, Bustamente said. One of his clients, who flies in from Texas every six to eight months, had a few drinks with his friend. He opened up about getting penis filler. Turns out, his friend had tried it, too.
“It was this aha moment for them,” Bustamante said. “Clearly, it’s among a lot of men.”
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