Immortality-obsessed tech mogul Bryan Johnson has spent the past four years meticulously chronicling his efforts to live forever by way of a regimented, data-driven lifestyle that includes gene therapy, bone-marrow transplants, hundreds of supplements, fasting, blood-plasma transfusions, red-light masks and much more. As the face of Blueprint Health, Johnson spends roughly $2 million per year on a one-man lifemaxxing initiative called Project Don’t Die. At the end of 2024, Johnson shared that his calorie-restricted diet had led to loss of facial fat, and his doctors dropped the truth bomb that facial volume “is pretty important for how people perceive youth.” The first experiment in what he dubbed Project Baby Face involved having his face injected with fat, but — humblebrag alert — Johnson has become so ripped that he had none to spare. Instead, his doctors used Renuva, a regenerative injectable made from donor fat: specifically, fat from cadavers.
Would you bequeath your remains to science if you knew they would likely be used to create profit for biomedical companies, cosmetic surgeons, morticians and an unregulated network of businesses that traffic in human body parts?
It didn’t go as planned: After the injections, Johnson’s face reddened and ballooned, his eyes almost swollen shut. The man who intends to live forever had been stymied by dead people.
The rise of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs — a 2025 Gallup poll found that 1 in 8 Americans take these prescribed medications — has led to the paradox of patients who find themselves with little fat available to restore plumpness to areas rendered gaunt by weight loss. Hyaluronic-acid fillers for the face, like Restylane and Juvederm, have been in use for two decades, but the rapid weight loss spurred by GLP-1s has revealed the need for more substantial, tissue-based injectables. And that’s where the corpses come in — tissue-derived Renuva and the even newer Alloclae are both examples of what beauty reporter Jessica Defino terms “necrocosmetics,” their ghoulish provenance wordsmithed away by marketing copy.
Cadavers have long been pressed into service on behalf of living people. Their tissue provides life-saving skin grafts, their ribcage cartilage allows for facial reconstruction, their bodies are used to teach anatomy, to understand disease, and to develop forensic protocols. But would you bequeath your remains to science if you knew they would likely be used to create profit for biomedical companies, cosmetic surgeons, morticians and an unregulated network of businesses that traffic in human body parts? This is the ethical question at the center of industries that aren’t merely selling beauty but are increasingly building a case for who is worthy of living forever.
In the July 2025 Dazed Digital piece “Dead gorgeous: How cadavers are fueling the beauty revolution,” Ellen Atlanta (author of 2024’s “Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women”) conjured an image that I haven’t been able to evict from my head: “cadaver labs” held at plastic-surgery conventions, where “freshly frozen heads are bought or hired by the day so that surgeons can perfect the deep‑plane ‘ponytail’ lift, trial plasma scalpels and practice docking robotic arms without risking a real-life patient . . . In these sessions, dismembered, recently deceased bodies are used as practice patients for surgeons. It’s an after-death facelift: a post-mortal makeover used as a teaching aid for the room.” In this cosmetic dystopia, death is simply another way to aid living faces and bodies whose optimization and upkeep have already been normalized as a never-finished project.
Those of us who check the organ and/or tissue-donor box on our driver’s license renewals do so in part because popular culture has been so successful at depicting organ donation as selfless, noble and rewarding. There’s much less awareness about how donated tissue is used, starting with its very definition: “tissue” refers to anything that is not a live organ — skin, cartilage, ligaments, veins, valves, bones all count — meaning that someone who donates tissue doesn’t know whether it will be used for straightforwardly medical purposes (like skin grafts for a burn victim) or less emergent ones (like a Brazilian butt lift).
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It’s not an either-or situation: A single donor’s tissue can be used for dozens of purposes. But the tissue-donation business is vast and, unlike organ donation, largely unregulated — and many of the stories that have emerged from the multibillion-dollar industry are even more unsettling than the vision of “fresh-frozen” cadaver heads loaded into an airport Sheraton’s Ballroom C, where they’ll be used to show off the latest advances in undetectable facelifts.
“In the U.S. market for human bodies, almost anyone can dissect and sell the dead,” was the headline of the first dispatch in a 2017 Reuters investigative series called “The Body Trade.” Unlike organs, which are patiently harvested, nestled in dry ice, and swiftly transported by helicopter to waiting patients, non-organ tissue banks operate in a less clearly defined, minimally regulated network of for-profit body brokers; in the years between 2011 and 2015, Reuters found, brokers distributed more than 182,000 body parts from roughly 50,000 bodies, charging fees that ranged from $500 for a head to more than $3,000 for a torso with legs. The open and completely legal market for non-organ body parts is a multibillion-dollar industry whose lobbyists have worked to streamline a body-salvage process with minimal regulation and oversight.
Two Colorado funeral-home operators, now serving prison sentences, certified cadavers who died of infectious diseases like Hepatitis B and C as disease-free before selling them. A Reuters journalist purchased a cervical spine and two cadaver heads for a total of $900 from a Tennessee-based tissue bank without any official vetting or follow-up questions about how the parts would be used and by whom. When the spine and heads arrived at their shipping address — the body-donation program at the University of Minnesota, Reuters’ partner for the investigative series — they were determined to be unusable due to insufficient documentation of their donors’ medical histories. (Key quote: “We regulate heads of lettuce in this country more than we regulate heads of bodies.”)
Many of the stories that have emerged from the multibillion-dollar industry are even more unsettling than the vision of “fresh-frozen” cadaver heads loaded into an airport Sheraton’s Ballroom C, where they’ll be used to show off the latest advances in undetectable facelifts.
The aesthetic underclass whose remains generate profit and shareholder value, meanwhile, are those who cannot afford to die well: Tissue banks source their donations from those living and dying in poverty: The spine purchased by the Reuters journalist was traced to a young man whose body was donated by his parents, who couldn’t afford a burial or cremation.
Awareness of the rigorous standards for organ donations as well as donation of blood, plasma and stem cells tends to make patients receiving donor tissue feel confident; as the anonymous 61-year-old woman subject of The Cut’s 2025 as-told-to “I Got my BBL From a Cadaver” noted, a failed root canal that required the use of grafted bone “normalized the idea of cadaver material being used in medical procedures in my mind.” But beyond the minimal regulation, underdeveloped tracking systems and risk of shoddy documentation that characterizes the tissue trade, there’s the fact that the adipose allograft matrix material used in Renuva and AlloClae isn’t required to meet the same standards as injectables like Botox, because they are classified not as drugs but as tissue-based products.
Clinics that advertise Renuva and Alloclae tend to use the term “FDA approved” because that’s a phrase consumers look for. But tissue-based products don’t technically require FDA approval or clearance for use, and also aren’t subject to the same long-term human testing as drugs; a November 2025 Allure report on Alloclae quoted an FDA representative saying, “The limited information provided on ‘Alloclae’ is not sufficient for us to determine how ‘Alloclae’ is appropriately regulated.”
The biotech companies that produce Renuva and Alloclae tout their rigorous cleaning and processing protocol, and there’s no reason to think that, for instance, Bryan Johnson’s allergic reaction to Renuva was anything more sinister. But the opaqueness of the non-transplant tissue marketplace and the fact that those selling them aren’t required to be licensed, and those buying them aren’t necessarily vetted, is worth side-eyeing. The beauty industry has a long history of playing fast and loose with both human and animal life, from cosmetic testing on lab animals to the children who have died in India’s “ghost mines” extracting mica that’s used to give makeup its gleam. If the use of GLP-1s continues to grow, it stands to reason that the development of tissue-based injectables will also be on the rise.
Maybe you don’t care what happens to your body parts after death. Maybe the thought of fat from your cadaver being used to sculpt the cheekbones and buttocks of those shelling out to support white, thin and youthful Western doesn’t inspire more than a shrug: What do I care? I’ll be dead. But this is where we return to Bryan Johnson and his quest to live forever. Along with fellow techbros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, Johnson is a transhumanist — someone who views human mortality not as part of the circle of life but as a pesky problem to be solved by technology. Transhumanists believe that the impending realization of superhuman artificial intelligence will allow humans to live forever as human-machine hybrids that will never age, deteriorate, or die. They also believe in eugenics: noted transhumanist Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, hoped to turn his New Mexico ranch into a breeding farm modeled on California’s Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that hoped to use the genetic material of Nobel Laureates and other white high achievers to create a generation of geniuses.
It’s a political philosophy that defines a worthwhile human life as physically and cognitively optimized, fully autonomous and paradigmatic. And the cosmetic dystopia that already exists slots easily into its framework: The people best suited to live in the future and become the transhumanist ruling class are those who can afford to not die. The rest of us will be bought and sold as the raw material that ensures their immortality.
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