The first thing that comes to mind when people think about skin rejuvenation at the plastic surgeon’s office is a facelift. However, skin tightening with a ‘nip and tuck’ is not always needed to restore a smooth, youthful appearance. Dr. Leonard Miller and the Boston Center for Facial Rejuvenation offer several state-of-the-art techniques for smoothing the skin and taking years off one’s appearance. Best of all: no surgery is required.
Understanding Age-Related Skin Changes
To get a better idea about the best techniques for facial rejuvenation, potential patients first need to understand what happens as the skin ages. Throughout our teens and early 20s, the skin is smooth and well-hydrated, beaming with radiance. However, as we push past the age of 30, the skin’s collagen stores begin to decrease. A reduction in both muscle mass and fatty tissue erase the healthy contours. Elastin declines, causing the skin to become lax and sag, especially around areas that are already losing their youthful shape. Women and men will lose volume in their cheeks and under their eyes. Wrinkles then form, often along the forehead, as well as around the eyes and mouth.
Coupled with environmental factors, genetics, and the slowdown of cell turnover, the skin will inevitably droop, features can become sunken and dark, and the face suddenly looks years older. Over time, people can lose 20-80% of their skin’s healthy thickness. So even for women who are meticulous with their skin care and daily moisturizer routine, the skin can lose its shape from the inside out.
Restoring a Fresh, Youthful Appearance
With an understanding of these changes now comes the ability to create a comprehensive treatment approach to target age related issues, achieving both an immediate and long-lasting aesthetic improvement. Dr. Miller has an arsenal of cutting-edge tools to both recreate, and maintain, a youthful and beautiful appearance – without surgery. While most only require a local anesthetic, and take less than an hour in the office, these treatments can make a significant improvement to one’s appearance.
Shaping Faces
First and foremost, regaining a youthful appearance means restoring facial shape and proportion. This can be done by creating lateral fullness, smoothing the natural jawline, creating fullness in the lips, contouring the chin, and restoring healthy volume under the eyes. Injectable dermal fillers, such as Sculptra, Radiesse, and Juvederm Vollure are designed to plump the facial tissues, sculpting the features and providing needed volume. At the Boston Center for Facial Rejuvenation, Dr. Miller offers a variety of different fillers, each equipped with different properties, including large and small molecules, perfect for targeting different needs.
The facial fat transfer is another option for shaping facial tissues. Fatty tissue is donated from another area, such as the abdomen or the buttocks, before being processed for reinjection. The living fat cells are then placed under the skin, creating a natural-looking fullness. The fat cells will adhere to the existing tissue, providing long-term results.
Lifting Faces
Innovative laser and energy devices can be useful to tighten, thicken, and lift, areas of thin loose skin. These lasers will also lighten age spots, or hyperpigmentation, another key sign of the aging process. ThermiTight reverses areas of loose skin along the jaw and neck by kick starting the body’s collagen production. Clear + Brilliant™ is a powerful, non-ablative laser treatment, used to refresh delicate, aging skin on the face, neck, chest, and hands.
The innovative injectable, Kybella, can be used to reduce the unsightly bulge of submental fat, or a double chin, that many people notice forming under the jawline. The treatment takes only minutes in the office. While the results are not immediate, over the following two to three months, the puffy submental fat will be eradicated.
The two latest technologies available at the B.C.F.R. to tighten the skin of the face and neck are Endymed Intensif and Profound. These procedures combine radiofrequency heat energy and needling to produce a tightened look and even an actual facelift effect up to a 30% improvement
Improving Lips
While focusing on wrinkles and sunken features, many people can overlook the changes that occur in the lips. With the aging face, it is common to see the lips shrink in size, with thinning and lose of hair definition. Injectable fillers, designed specifically to target the delicate tissue of the mouth, can create a plumper shape to the lips. Products such as Restylane, and Juvederm Volbella are all made to create fullness of the upper and lower lip, providing shape and symmetry. Lip definition can be improved, and Marionette and smile lines can be softened, restoring a youthful appearance.
Contact the Boston Center for Facial Rejuvenation:
Contact the Boston Center for Facial Rejuvenation to find out if a non-surgical treatment is all that is needed to take your skin back to a younger, more refreshed appearance. Call our Boston office at (617) 735-8735 to schedule your noninvasive skin rejuvenation consultation with Dr. Miller, or fill out our easy, online consultation form.
