Hello Team and Fans!
May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month and my intention was to write about skin cancer for my first blog, but I will have to do that as a second blog in the same month because I am too excited about something else. This past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing one of my regular clients (we have to make special arrangements because she has moved out of Santa Rosa for her work during the week) and treating her to a little filler. She inspired me to write because I got the chance to take her “after picture” and then compared it to a picture from a couple of years ago. It is amazing. Her friends are right. She is getting younger instead of older! It’s not that she has done some major work with a big-time procedure, or even done a full “liquid facelift,” rather she has just steadily invested in herself an average of $200 per month and the results are AMAZING. It is the accumulation of a little Botox just a few times per year, a little filler placed strategically, a few rounds of Sublime and a single Sublative treatment over 29 months have added up to a gestalt of a fresher, more rested, seriously younger-than-before appearance that makes her outside look like she FEELS on the inside! To be totally honest, in addition to the “aesthetic medicine” we have also worked together on keeping her hormones balanced and she does the regular hard work of exercising at the gym Every-Single -Day, eating a healthy diet, and reducing the stress in her work life. I am hoping that she might recognize herself in this story and at some point let me publish the 2013 vs 2015 pictures… but until then let me go to another story that has me grinning!
I have the Best Job Ever. It makes me so happy to provide a service that very subtly but absolutely obviously, changes how someone looks in a way that they just look a little, indescribably, “better”. Not that they looked bad before, just that now it is a little less tired, a little more fresh, a little more like the person that they feel like on the inside.
I had a client come in today for a 1 week follow up after her “liquid face lift” of 2 syringes of Voluma and 1 syringe of Juvederm. She HAS given me permission to share her photos. Look at these and I will explain below what has changed. It’s a little like those games where you have to look at the two pictures and see what the differences are. Check it out:
I injected the Voluma into her cheeks, along the cheek bones and under the eyes, lifting her up and reducing the appearance of the hollows under her eyes. Some of the Juvederm went into her lips to give a very slight upturn to the upper lip and slight pout to the lower lip. This did not change the volume much but, as evident on the lateral images, makes the mouth look ever so slightly more youthful. As we age, our lips tend to turn inward, causing the classic pursed lip look of a crone. Filling the edges of the lips tightens away the little vertical lines and creates that very slight turn-out rather than turn-in as you can see in the pictures. Filling the lateral cheek bones lifted her face ever so slightly to reduce the lower face “jowls” and makes the shape of the face more like an upside down triangle instead of a rectangle. A tiny bit of filler in the mid anterior cheek almost completely resolves what is called the “malar crease” or the mid face aspect of the tear trough (where the tears track down your face when you cry) and about the same amount along the infra-orbital rim greatly reduces the hollowness that made her eyes appear tired even when she wasn’t!
The obvious changes are that her naso-labial folds are a little less apparent on the frontal photo. I want to emphasize that I did NOT put filler in them. I say it all of the time in the office, but the absence of wrinkles in not the equivalence to beauty. There is an over-all lift that we actually want when the effects of gravity and time have had their way with our faces and bodies. Wrinkles may seem like the manifestation, but actually there is much more to this than skin deep. In this client’s case, her lateral images actually seem to have MORE wrinkles because she was having a hard time not grinning. In spite of being able to see more smile lines on those images, the comparison still looks better from top to bottom because her cheeks are every so slightly more full and the eyes are less hollow and the lips and chin more youthful. I wonder what anyone else thinks? We are posting these images on FaceBook too… maybe you would care to comment there?