When pandemic lockdowns forced aesthetician William Moore to temporarily shutter his Dallas spa, Advanced Skin Fitness, he was left with a lot of spare time on his Botox-injecting hands.
What new procedure could he workshop, Moore wondered, using his two decades’ worth of experience? The answer lay below the beltline.
“If you get out of bed, take a shower, dry yourself off, and the first thing you see is a small penis? That can really play a big part in how successful and assertive you are,” he says. For years, Moore had been noticing an uptick in customers telling him about—even showing him—botched procedures they’d had to augment the size of their penis. Many of them involved a silicone shot that caused disfigurement.
Moore had a hunch he could devise something better using nothing more than a few vials of dermal filler, a steady grip, and a lot of confidence. Four years later, the girth-boosting procedure he devised and named Phallofill is now available in 15 states from almost 20 providers, including urologists and plastic surgeons.
Moore relies on F.D.A.-approved hyaluronic acid, the commonplace filler, injecting it along the sides of the penis rather than the top or the bottom. This creates a more naturally enlarged look, he says. “I’m gay, and I’ve seen large penises,” he says. “A large penis is wide, not round, and kind of flat.”
Moore says that each visit, he uses between four and six syringes of filler to add around a quarter of an inch in girth to most penises. However, the majority of his clients typically request a full inch of augmentation, so they pay between $10,000 and $12,000 for several shots over six months or so. Phallofill’s effects last around three years. He adds that, in other areas, such as the face, dermal filler like this is injected so that it floats freely over the bone, adding volume. Moore deploys it a different way, between two fascia, where there is no blood flow and minimal, if any, lymphatic drainage, so that it stays in place rather than migrating.
Because Phallofill requires no incisions, there is little downtime after the procedure. Customers must refrain from having sex, whether alone or with a partner, for 10 days after each treatment.
Phallofill’s true innovation, though, focuses on aftercare. Moore says that the patients he treated in 2020 were pleased by the initial results, but within a year they returned with complaints that their penises had started to look lumpy. Moore attributes this to the natural movements of the penis, which he describes as working like an accordion: as it expands and contracts, the filler tends to ripple and bunch up.
In order to help the filler settle and become smooth, he created the Phallosleeve, a millimeters-thin silicon sleeve that patients wear like a genital leg warmer for three weeks after each treatment to keep everything in place. (The Phallosleeve comes in 10 sizes.) Moore promises that it’s comfortable enough that most patients forget they’re wearing it, and, akin to a bra, it improves the appearance of the penis as it hangs under clothes. (In fact, a male version of cameltoe has become a desirable look among some gay men.)
Phallofill’s client base is primarily straight men who have average-sized penises. “I’ve never had a micro-penis to treat, and the majority of men have an average to above average penis, or even really large,” he says, noting how early access to pornography has skewed self-perception among his younger clients in particular.
Moore offers financing for those unable to pay in full up front; many of his patients are blue-collar workers. One, for example, “had never purchased anything for himself in his life, but he purchased a penis,” says Moore.
One businessman in his 40s recently traveled to Dallas from his home in Alabama for a Phallofill treatment. He had encountered so many disappointed women that he’d started warning them about his small penis on the first date; he said it was less humiliating when they left after the check arrived versus when he was stark naked. This client prepaid for five sessions but ended up settling for three, during which he gained three-quarters of an inch in girth.
Another success story concerns a man in his 50s whose second wife was much younger. She found his penis unsatisfying, and they had addressed the issue by recruiting a large-penised proxy from a Reddit forum to perform in the bedroom. When the emotional complications of this outsourcing almost ended their marriage, he decided to undergo Phallofill to add an extra 1.25 inches. The couple reconciled, and the proxy never returned.
“He had never purchased anything for himself in his life, but he purchased a penis.”
Dr. Paul Turek, a sexual-health-and-fertility urologist based in San Francisco and Beverly Hills, says that Phallofill is one of the least invasive treatments in the realm of penile augmentation. (Which includes, among other eyebrow-raising procedures, a Russian method of rebuilding the penis by moving dorsal muscles from the back to bulk it out.) Still, Turek recommends exercising caution with Phallofill. “This is relatively less invasive, but the question is the risk-reward profile,” he says. “It’s not permanent, but it’s not particularly dangerous. The filler is not being given intradermally, but subdermally, so it’s not being injected into the space it’s approved for, so it will spread more, like a bruise or like spilling water on the floor.”
Moore counters that he’s not injecting in that way at all, but rather between the dartos fascia and Buck’s fascia—an area that holds the penis rigid when it’s erect. “Below that layer, the penis is just as firm as it was prior to filler, only more girthy,” he says.
The Phallofill-boosted territory will also be doughier than the rest of the penis, Turek observes. He prefers a method called penile remodeling. This involves putting the penis in a traction-like device twice a day for 30 minutes, which he claims can add just under an inch in length after three to six months. Penile remodeling is a technique initially focused on treating patients with Peyronie’s disease—put simply, a curved penis—but can be repurposed for those keen to do more than simply straighten it out, as Turek does. He typically uses the device from Restorex, which conducted two clinical trials with the Mayo Clinic; the results showed that 94 percent of the men gained an average of 0.62 inches of additional length.
The New York–based dermatologist Dr. Robert Anolik, who does not treat penises with either traction or injections, acknowledges the potential benefits of Phallofill. “It’s non-surgical, reversible, and biocompatible,” he says, noting that it will naturally dissolve, or can be dissolved using an enzyme. Since hyaluronic acid occurs naturally in the body, he says, “It’s not necessarily a long-term commitment.”
Still, he warns that seemingly minor side effects might take on outsize importance, given their location. “While swelling may sound benign, in a confined area like the penis, there could be concerns of limited blood flow because of the pressure,” he says.
And there are certainly wrinkles to iron out in Moore’s innovation—circumcised penises, for example, require more injections of smaller amounts of hyaluronic acid. “The dermal filler can move inside your foreskin much more easily,” he says. “It’s like toothpaste in a tube. The plane between the Bucks fascia and the dartos fascia extends all the way through the foreskin, and it’s so loose that the dermal filler can work its way through.” It’s also more challenging for an uncircumcised penis to wear the silicon sleeve, as its surface is less taut.
But as evidence of Phallofill’s safety, Moore cites his almost 500 patients. Only two had infections—the first because he had sex within a few days of treatment, and the second from sitting in a car for three days while working as a border-patrol agent, sweating and sedentary.
Perhaps the best ambassador, though, is Moore himself, who started trying to enlarge his own penis 15 years ago. “I was dating a guy who called me a ‘little dick’ in an argument. It never left my head,” he says. Moore went on to undergo multiple procedures, including having his suspensory ligament cut, so that the flaccid penis looks larger, and liposuction to transfer fat from his abdomen to his penis to boost its girth.
None of them proved successful, physically or psychologically. And that’s how he became both Phallofill’s inventor and its target audience. “I have so much empathy for these guys,” he says.
Mark Ellwood is a columnist for Bloomberg Pursuits, the creator and a co-host of Bloomberg’s Travel Genius podcast, and the author of Bargain Fever: How to Shop in a Discounted World
