How changing your chin can make you look 10 years younger

Posted 2018年08月28日星期二

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When patients land in a dermatologist’s office, frustrated with a line or fold, they often want to plump the offending crease with filler. See a wrinkle, fill a wrinkle. Dr Low Chai Ling who has been practicing aesthetic medicine for over 15 years call it ‘chasing a wrinkle’. It’s one of the things she doesn’t encourage her patients to do.

“Not every wrinkle detracts from the beauty of the face, some actually allows the face to look gracefully mature befitting the age or seniority of their years” she explains. Of course knowing where to treat and where to stop is vital, she explains. But looking at the face with a holistic eye is key to avoiding the over-filled ‘pillow’ effect that many badly done filler treatments have resulted in.

Secondly, it isn’t just wrinkles that detract from the beauty of a face. That’s why getting rid of facial wrinkles may not be enough to obscure the signs of aging. For a truly youthful look, you’d have to reshape the bones in your face, a study says.

As we grow older, our facial bones including our eye sockets, nose and upper jaw continue to change. For example, our eye sockets enlarge, and the angle of the bones beneath our eyebrows decreases which could contribute to the formation of frown lines on our foreheads, “crow’s feet” at the corners of our eyes and droopy lower eyelids, the researchers say.

The researchers analyzed computed tomography scans of the facial bones of young people (age 20 to 40), middle-age people (41 to 64), and older people (65 and up). (All the CT scans had been medically necessary for other reasons not for planning plastic surgery, the researchers said.) Detailed measurements of three-dimensional reconstructions of the scans revealed some important differences in the facial bone structure between age groups.

Researchers found that the jaw bone shrank with age, leading to reduction in size of the appearance of the chin. That’s why as we enter our fourth and fifth decade, we usually lose the well-defined contours of our jawline as this area recedes with time, and formation of jowls begin. More bad news for ladies. Although these changes occurred in both sexes, many occurred earlier in women between young and middle age. In men, most of the changes occurred between middle age and old age.

Thankfully, some doctors like Dr Low who are fans of a more holistic rejuvenation of the face rather than chasing wrinkles, have come up with fixes to counteract bone resorption changes.

1. Chin Fillers
To replace the loss of volume of the chin, special dermal fillers with high G-prime can be used. These fillers are able to hold its shape and can be used to define the chin and jawline. For ladies, they can help to recreate a V-shape appearance of the lower face, whereas for men, they are able to help recreate a more defined jawline.

2. Ulthera
When it comes to aging, nothing shouts “old” like jowls. The descent of our soft tissue as well as sagging of the skin leads to accumulation of skin folds on the jawline. Short of surgery, Ulthera which uses microfocused ultrasound is able to contract and tighten thick skin folds, making it the treatment of choice to tighten and define the jawline to a more youthful state.

3. Neck Threadlift
Double chins do not only plague those who are overweight. As we age, we sometimes find pockets of fat as well as loose tissues that gives us the dreaded ‘double chin’ effect. Latest threadlifts such as the Infinity Neck lift are non-surgical procedures using 100% bio-absorbable threads to lift up the droopy skin and tissues in this area giving you a firmer and more youthful appearance instantly. As the threads dissolve over a few months, they stimulate vectors of collagen that maintain the lift for over 12 months.