Fillers Overview
The big decisions for anyone undergoing a filler treatment are: what areas are you treating and how long do you want the results to last. As long as you are clear on these two questions, the best option for filling is often easy to decide.
When discussing fillers for rejuvenation, I like to begin with this important observation about aging: in the most simple terms, shadows make us look older. I’m talking here about the shadows that appear from wrinkles, lines, eyelid fat bags and hollow or flat cheek areas. When we were all young, there were almost no shadows in the face. We had tighter skin, more volume, and therefore a more rounded, convex shape, and the light bounced off our faces in all directions.
As we age, there are different types of shadows that form on the face, from fine lines to jowls, but all have in common that they are telling us and often the world around us that we are looking older.
Fillers literally fill these shadows and make them better or sometimes can make them disappear, and this is the key to their success. We’ll come back to the concept of shadows as we make our way through the available options.
There are a few treatments such as lip augmentation or cheek shaping which are not for aging and instead are to augment beauty. So when we discuss these treatment areas during a consultation, we don’t focus on shadows but instead focus on the patient goals for what they find to be a goal for beauty.
Differences between the filler options:
To get a grasp on the differences between fillers, it’s important for us to focus on several ways in which these fillers differ:
- Filler category (based on the filler’s main ingredient)
- Best facial areas to use the filler
- Duration of the result
- Amount of volume (cubic centimeters, or cc’s) gained with a treatment
- The economic ‘value’ of a treatment compared to the others (this is different from the price – I’ll explain below).
To Read more about filler categories (what they are made of) click here
