It’s a warm Tuesday in early May, and I’m a block from the historic New York Public Library building in midtown staring at a penis. It’s semi-erect and bleeding slightly, but there’s gauze on hand to soak things up. Bobbing in and out from under the skin at the shaft is an inch-long needle (technically a cannula since it’s not sharp and is going into a small hole already created by a needle) attached to a syringe that contains hyaluronic acid. This same type of filler that’s been
injected into countless lips is now being used to pursue a plumper, thicker look — except in this case, it’s one most people won’t see.
Dressed in all black, wearing purple medical gloves, and displaying the no-nonsense demeanor of someone who’s lost track of how many penises he’s seen in his career is Chris Bustamante, 32, known to many online as
Injector Chris. We’re at
Lushful Aesthetics, the clinic he runs as a licensed nurse practitioner and where this procedure, penile-girth enhancement (also known as penis filler), has quickly become the bulk of his working life.
As Bustamante injects five vials first into the sides of the shaft, then six more around the glans (if you’re picturing a mushroom as the head of a penis, that’s the glans, and he is injecting around the base rim of the dome), he sweeps the needle slightly from side to side, then uses his thumbs to massage out any filler lumps, sculpting through what he calls “transitional zones” like a potter smoothing an edge of clay.