Beauty Doc Blog

One of the ways that cosmetic surgery can help you achieve the look you desire is by ensuring that your face is fully in proportion. This is one of the most important features of an attractive face: it should be symmetrical and the eyes, nose, mouth and ears should be balanced. Sometimes, one of our features stands out among the rest as being less-than-ideal. If you have a weak, small or disproportionate chin, you might want to consider chin augmentation to give you that pristine profile.

A small chin can cause an otherwise good-looking face to appear weak. The nose might appear larger than it is, or the neck might look thicker than it is. You want to have balance in all of your facial features, and your chin is a subtle but important part of this equation.

The chin augmentation surgery itself takes anywhere from 30 minutes to over an hour. Your surgeon will make an incision either along the natural line of your chin on the outside, or in your mouth where your gums and lower lip meet. This incision will be relatively small, and will stretch to accommodate the implant. The implant itself will be made of a synthetic material that is design to look and feel just like the bone under your chin, so you don’t have to worry about an unnatural appearance after surgery. Your doctor will insert this implant into the incision, and will use sutures to close up the wound.

Your chin and jaw area will be tender for several days after the surgery, and you will likely have to avoid chewing as much as possible. Your doctor will usually apply a dressing to the chin, which should be kept on for several days until a follow-up appointment. Once it is taken off, you will have more freedom to move your jaw.

After about six weeks, the area should be free from any remaining swelling and pain, and you can enjoy the results of the surgery. If the incision was made inside the mouth, there will be no visible scar; if it was made along the jawline, the scar will be minimal.

The size and shape of your implant will depend on the balance of your other features. You and your doctor can build up a mock profile to see how this will look after it is done. Because of the nature of the implant, the result will likely be permanent, so be sure this is something that you want for life.

Your profile will appear more defined and you will enjoy a more balanced facial structure after a successful chin augmentation. Discuss this with your doctor today, and see if it’s right for you.

When we think of the signs of aging, we often think of the face. Wrinkles, sun spots, saggy skin… it all begins to show as we get older around the eyes, forehead, nose, mouth and neck. But the area of our body that is often overlooked until it actually does begin to show the signs of aging is the hand. This area too becomes wrinkly, loses a lot of its volume and can show veins, sun spots and other unsightly blemishes as we age.

Because we use our hands for everything from minor home improvements to applying our facial skin cream, they are exposed to a wide variety of chemicals, environmental damage, callouses, and other damaging factors. This can often result in hands that look older than even our faces as we age.

Cosmetic surgery offers a variety of procedures to bring back the youth to your hands. Depending on the aspect of your hands that you would most like to see improved, your surgeon may recommend anything from topical hand cream to vein surgery.

If you have a large amount of sun spots, age spots, or darker pigmentation areas on your hand, you can opt for a chemical peel or microdermabrasion. These procedures will remove the outer layers of skin that have the most damage, and promote the healthy growth of new skin without the tell-tale signs of aging.

You can also undergo a sclerotherapy procedure. This is used to rid your hands of prominent blue veins that make them look old and frail. A surgeon will inject the vein or veins with a chemical that will irritate the vein until it turns white and fades away with time.

Laser skin resurfacing techniques can also be used to send short bursts of laser energy through the surface skin on your hand. This will affect deeper tissue, and can be used to target veins, age or sun spots and unhealthy-looking skin.

If your hands suffer from a thin, bony look, you can ask your surgeon if injectables might be the way to go. Your surgeon can inject fillers into your hands to give them a more full, plump and young appearance, and rid you of that frail appearance.

You can also get younger looking hands through some more invasive procedures. A qualified surgeon can perform fat grafting to permanently fill out your hands, skin excess correction to remove loose and saggy skin, invasive vein removal and several other procedures.

You hands don’t have to give your age away. If you feel younger than your hands look, talk to a board certified cosmetic surgeon and see which procedure or set of procedures can help you regain your once youthful hands.

Women often see their physical appearance as a barrier to their happiness. Cosmetic surgery offers a variety of procedures to get the body you want, in order to help you look your best and boost your self-esteem. And breast augmentations, being the number one surgery in the nation, are often the surgeries of choice for many young and older women looking to improve their aesthetic appearance.

Because breast implants are a major surgery, there are some risks. Even if you have gone through the checklist of ensuring your health is adequate, your doctor is qualified and you are doing this for the right reasons, there is a small chance that the surgery will encounter some complications.

Breast encapsulation is a condition where one or both of the breasts become hard and misshapen. It is a result of a capsule forming around the breast implant and hardening, forcing the implant upwards and squeezing it with pressure. A capsule forming around a foreign object in the body is normal (such as a hip replacement), but the excessive scar tissue that builds around an encapsulated breast implant is not.

Breast encapsulation or capsular contracture can occur after a breast augmentation. It often occurs after an infection or other medical issue, but it can also occur without any warning signs at all. There is still debate about why it occurs, and what causes it.

A scale is used to grade the severity of capsular contracture. Going from Grade I to Grade IV, it uses the softness/hardness and appearance of the breast as indicator of how severe the encapsulation is. For Grade III (the breast is firm and looks abnormal) and Grade IV (the breast is hard, painful, and looks abnormal) encapsulation, most women must go in for surgery to fix the problem.

Breast encapsulation is more common with silicon-gel filled breast implants. According to the FDA, “The IOM report26 stated that, for studies involving both silicone gel-filled and saline-filled breast implants, the capsular contracture rates were 36-81% for silicone-gel filled breast implants and 8-41% for saline-filled breast implants” (You can read the entire report here).

Safety should always be a concern when undergoing any major surgery. Talk to your doctor about breast encapsulation, how to avoid it, and what to do if you experience it. Arm yourself with knowledge about breast augmentation surgery before you undergo the procedure, and you will feel fully confident when you are out of the operating room.

Botox is the most widely recognized brand name in cosmetic surgery. Whether you’re just diving into your research or you’re a veteran of cosmetic procedures, chances are you’ve at least thought about Botox (and possibly you’ve already had one or two injections). We all know it is the number one wrinkle-fighting injectable on the market, but do you know that there are a handful of other things that Botox can improve as well? Some of the procedures below may be off-label, and you should discuss these procedures with a board certified surgeon before opting for one of them.

Besides wrinkles, Botox is approved for use to combat the following: cross eyes, uncontrollable blinking, and muscle spasms in the neck and shoulders. It also recently got FDA approval to target frown lines. All of these are possible because of the way that Botox works. It does not stimulate collagen growth or “fill in” wrinkles. Instead, it paralyzes the muscle and makes it impossible for muscle contractions under the skin to cause a wrinkle to form.

In 2002, research came out about the potential use of Botox as a treatment for severe underarm perspiration, or hyperhidrosis. The initial findings show that Botox effectively reduced the chemical which causes sweating, acetycholine, in all twelve of the patients. The period of non-sweating that they experienced lasted between four to seven months.

Botox has also been used to treat migraines. Because of the toxic nature of Botox, it can prevent the muscle tension in the head, neck and shoulders that often causes migraines. Many doctors are administering Botox as a treatment for migraines, but this type of use is still in its Phase III testing and has not received FDA approval yet.

Botox has also seen success in less conventional areas of the body. It is now being considered for use as a treatment for overactive bladders. Those with bladder incontinence suffer from muscle spasms in their bladder which causes them to have to run for a bathroom on a sporadic and uncontrollable basis. A new study which examines the quality of life of individuals with overactive bladders shows that Botox does improve quality of life by preventing bladder muscle spasms. The results of this study can be found here.

Botox may be the miracle injection of the cosmetic surgery field for now, but with some more time and clinical trials, you may see it being used for other treatments in very different medical fields.