Hello. I’m Dr. Denise Baker coming to you from Longevity Wellness Clinic. I’m going to talk to you today about a specific type of filler that we use. Fillers or dermal fillers are substances that are placed under the skin to lift the skin up and to restore a normal shape, a normal convex contour and a normal appearance that matches what your face and your genetics used to be.
So when you come in for your consult, I would really like you to bring a picture of your favorite face. For those of us who are older, certainly not one 40, 50 years ago. But your favorite face after you have matured. So something in your 20s or 30s and it helps me to analyze what has changed in you since that photograph was taken and how you are today when you come in to see me.
The largest class of dermal fillers are a product called hyaluronic acid or hyaluronic gel fillers and I have samples in the office where you can actually touch a sample of it to actually feel the resistance, to be able to feel the change and the lift that it does and gives to your skin.
When you come in for your consult, I will be able to view your picture. Actually touch your skin to be able to feel the support and allow you to feel how products feel underneath the skin.
We will customize the type of hyaluronic gel that we order for you. So we make sure we have the proper product to sit on the proper structure. For instance, there are several gel products that I prefer when I’m lifting up the brow.
I’m not talking about making it come up very high but I’m talking about reducing the hooding that you might see, if you have lost some of the fat support between here and here. So we raise the brow up so you have less skin redundancy. This will be in lieu of a blepharoplasty or until you’re ready for your bleph.
Another place that we see a dramatic change is when both men and women lose the natural midface. For women, the ideal facial structure is a heart shape. So when they lose the outside fat support over that prominent bone, the skin comes down, then they get some jowling.
They actually lose the beautiful support and you see an increase in the prominence of the parentheses or nasal labial fold and you see an increase in the prominence of the puppet lines or the downward corner turning.
So when you actually restore the volume in the midface, it actually brings it up nicely and helps to restore that normal heart-shaped volume.
There are other products that I use when I do a liquid nose job. A particular group of products that I use would be able to straighten out the broad, natural line of the nose and if you’ve had an accident or had surgeries and there are some irregularities, it smooths out beautifully with the hyaluronic acid gels.
Another area that we have a very strong interest is lips. Now when I’m teaching the physicians how to do lip support and lip augmentation, there are a number of different patterns that I teach. But in general, we want to restore the normal contour of what you personally had in your favorite photos. So we may look at the columella. We may look at the shape of the lip. We will look at the ratio of the upper lip to the lower lip. We will look at how much it actually projects off of your teeth and even if you don’t have the perfect alignment of teeth, we can actually restore some of that appearance with how we put the hyaluronic gel filler into your lips.
We also want to make sure the corners come up nicely and if you don’t have any downward turn. There are also times when we will restore the volume below that lip line. But our goal is to use the hyaluronic acid gel which is a very natural substance, to be able to restore the contours that we see in your pictures, that you saw in your face and that you want us to help you go back to your natural, normal youthful, healthy, happy face
So the hyaluronic acid, the gel, hyaluronic gel, you may have heard of that on some of the television shows or commercials. It’s a very natural substance and how it’s manufactured determines how much lift or buoyancy it has to be able to lift that skin up.
So this was our little discussion on hyaluronic acid, how it actually helps to lift and restore the normal contours and how it can actually help improve, take you back to your normal self and the other feature that is fascinating is that we frequently see a change in someone’s self-confidence. They’re back to their normal self. They’re not distracted or their thoughts about “How have I changed?” have not interfered with how they’re interacting with their loved ones, with their cohorts, with their work or their social friends.