“With facial implants, what we’re doing is creating a space on an area that might be weak, say the chin area or the cheek are two popular areas, also the angle of the jaw is an area where a lot of patients are looking for more contour.
The beauty of the new preformed implants that are available is that we’ve gotten passed this era where it used to be a little tiny button that we would put at the end of the chin here. Now these implants are designed in what are called anatomical configurations and I’m showing right now a sizer this is actually not an actual implant but a sizer that we can put on somebody when they come in but these implants are designed so that they contour very nicely to the bone, the underlying bone which in the case of the chin area is the mandible bone or the chin bone, and that’s extended all away along the side and you can see that they taper gradually over to the side to virtually no thickness or no augmentation and in the mid-line we can give a variety of thicknesses or distances out from the chin itself, you can see that there’s thickness there and in fact some of these contours and again this is a sizer that I’m showing, can really bring the chin out on the case of this one a dramatic squaring of the chin would be achieved.
Now these are actual implants here, ones that we would use. These are once that have been explanted, washed and sterilized, I don’t use them, you don’t use them again they’re used for me as models but you can see that they’re made of very soft material, I can smash this but, and it sort of feels soft, softer than rubber but the beauty is that they come and fill in the genio mandibular sulcus here in the corner , an area that we all lose soft tissue in, it’s the end of the marionette line here so very commonly for doing a lip and someone has a week chin I’ll use one of these anatomical implants to actually give them a little bit more chin projection and also to fill in the space here, where the pre jowl is. There is a design also where we don’t any augmentation right here in the middle where I’m holding my finger so it has no thickness here but on the side there’s fullness that comes out long and fills in that what we call the pre-jowl sulcus, the pre jowl deep right here that’s evident in most people as we eclipse our 50s.
The other types of implants that are commonly used and again there are sizers, and I’m just going to show you some examples, are implants that are really for malar or cheek augmentation and there’s a little notch in them to accommodate for the small nerve that comes out here, a sensory nerve that we have and we want to avoid that and this one is specifically designed as a way of augmenting the cheek bone as it comes out to the side here and also to give a little more fullness to the mid portion of the face.
Now this is closer to the traditional cheek implants that used to just sit right here as a little tiny bump on the cheek but they’re designed to be more natural in their contour by designing them in such a way that they lie flat on the bones and when I place these I’m going up underneath the lip and creating a perfect space for this to live in so there’s no external scar when I place this.
If we look at some of the other designs for this you can see that many people are spending thousands and thousands of dollars every year or six months on mid-face volume enhancement with injectable fillers.
Some of the shells you can see here which create mid-face volume can give long term mid-face volume, they’re contoured to the face, they taper on the sides over here if I show you the side of this implant, it tapers off to nothing and so there’s no edges or contour changes that can be seen externally but we’re giving mid-face volume correction for the long term not for a year not for 6 months but for as long as we wanted and if we wanted to remove this implant we could certainly do that and again, just going through the inside of the mouth there’s a good approach to gasping it and pulling that implant out.
I have a box that I use a different sizers, I’ll fit the patient specifically for the size and shape that they need. There are virtually an infinite number of sizes and shape to these implants and this is in actual implant that you can plant that would be use for malar augmentation and the other part I can do is simply customize them. I can actually trim these implants when we’re placing them so that they’re fitted nicely and that they give the right amount of contour but are not too big or too small for the individual patient.
If you have any questions about injectable filler materials or more specifically our discussion point today these implantable materials, please don’t hesitate to contact me at DrMass.com you can send photographs if you want and I can morph those images with computer imaging and show you either privately or publicly if you wish to share those images before and after and certainly visit my website at MassClinic.com or we have more written information about facial implants. This Corey S. Maas MDTM on Looking Your Best.”
