Anti Aging with Sasha - Permanent fillers Aquamid etc.
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How to fill in hollow areas of your face!Aquamid and related facial fillers, such as perlane etc are a much neglected aspect of anti-aging, yet quite essential. Often people go having lifts way before they are necessary - when the loose skin is really caused by the loss of tissue under the skin as we age. Subcutaneous fat loss is a more important aspect of aging than you might think. Remember the kids at school who had exceptionally dry skin? They would have one or two premature wrinkles around the eyes and mouth. It wouldn't make them look significantly older though, because the fat layer under the skin was still intact. You have to be careful to distinguish the facial wasting that can be corrected with Aquamid etc from muscle sagging causing skin to droop. If you move your facial muscles and the problem corrects itself, its a muscle sagging problem, if it doesn't, you have subcutaneous fat loss. It is probably the main cause of loose skin up till about age 50. Replacing subcutaneous facial fat might also help hide some underlying muscle sag, depending on the skill of your practitioner. Here are two photos of a well-known actress under natural light. (Finding pictures of actresses in natural light isn't easy!) but here she is on the left. On the right is the exact same photograph after I have retouched it to show the effect she might get after a lot of soft tissue filler.
So what have I done here? Thats quite a change! The blotchiness went, because thats just a side effect of pushing pixels round, but most of the change is the increase in volume in certain areas.
I added some filler to her frown lines, although a similar effect might be achieved by botox or facial relaxers. After all of this, her face looked very young, but the eyes looked much older so I mimicked the effect of an upper-eye lift to take out the slight excess skin there. It was the only effect here that cannot be achieved by filler and a good foundation. Women need more fat under their skin than men do. Its part of the reason we are pleasantly soft and squishy! A man can still look reasonably good having lost a bit of facial fat. He will look older, but he will look 'manly'. The instant a woman loses any amount of subcutaneous fat she starts looking manly too. When you see people who look obviously 'lifted' even though the skin drapes properly, what you are noticing is how spare their faces look from lower cheekbone to jaw. The face might even curve inwards instead of outwards! A slight indentation under the cheekbones like, say, Joan Crawford had, is very nice but an entirely concave lower face looks dreadful - and is an all to common result of over-enthusiastic skin tightening by people who never read a day's research since they qualified. There is just less face than there used to be, and we notice it whether we realise this or not! The fat under the skin has been lost with age and instead of replacing it, then doing a lift if neccessary, the lift has merely drawn back all the excess skin. If the loss of facial volume had been corrected first, and then excess skin removed, the lift would have looked entirely natural. It might even have been unnecessary. There are a few ways of replacing facial fat. The most obvious is a fat graft, but this is by no means your only option. The problem with fat transplants is that not all the fat will 'take'. You might end up with lumpy, uneven results. This is not good! A lot of beauty depends on smooth skin and facial symmetry. A fat graft gone wrong spells disaster on both counts. But much depends on the skill of the practitioner and how gently the harvested fat is centrifuged, plus how carefully it is laid down in its new location. I've heard excellent reports for one or two surgeons, but honestly, this technique is so difficult I don't think there will ever be enough people around truly capable of it. This leaves us with two options for fillers. Natural and synthetic. There are various techniques for harvesting your own collagen or getting your own collagen to grow using precursor cells and I might go into these later, but most people use bovine collagen. This means some cow somewhere is going to die. Now I think beauty is important, but its not that important. Besides, injected collagen doesn't last long. You can more or less guarantee it will last a month, but much longer than that is down to luck and age. Its very expensive, considering. And forget creams containing collagen! The collagen molecule is too large to penetrate the skin, so sticking some on top is a waste of money as well as cows. Perlane would be a good bet if you wanted something longer lasting, and is used widely in the US. My beautician/nurse lady says thats why American actresses seem to be aging much less than they did 20 years ago. But it has to be done again and again. We don't all get paid $10 million per assignment so this gets expensive fast. Anyway, the reason its used in the US is because they don't have Aquamid yet. Aquamid is permanent (but removeable). It is injected in the lower layers of the skin or into the lips, and it stays there. Its non-toxic, being made of water and a small percentage of poly-acrylamide (used as an additive to drinking water) to hold the water in a matrix. One treatment gives you about as much poly-acrylamide as drinking tap water for three days every time you are thirsty. The only risks appear to be the same risks associated with all fillers - infection at the site of injection or nerve damage if your practitioner doesn't know what they are doing. Not usually a problem, but make sure your practictioner is a doctor or nurse and knows about faces and nerve branches. Get them to mix some anaesthetic in with the Aquamid too, or it will hurt as it goes in - especially in the lip area! Due to the fact your skin is being injected with something, it will swell up slightly so the effects will lessen over the next few days. It might take two treatments to raise a sunken-in area to the right level, but after that its permanent. In various forms, it has been used in the eastern block for around 30 years. It should soon be approved by the FDA for use in America, but until then you will have to come to Europe to get it. It costs around three times as much as collagen. You can find it for the cheapest price at the Boston Clinic in Bayswater, London, or if you pay slightly more you can see Liinzi James in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge (0207 5844777 or +44207 5844777 from outside the UK). Liinzi has a real understanding of facial structure. With some people you have to tell them what to do, which might be a problem if you aren't very artistic. Liinzi knows without being told. Note for Americans. London is that place near Scotland, where the Queen lives! If you have a severe problem, say you look like John Kerry or something, you'll end up spending as much on this as you would a facelift, perhaps even slightly more as prices are around $1000 per cc. But, there is no rule says you have to have it all done at once, and unless you have severe sagging, the results are far better than surgery - plus there is no down time. Right around when your surgeon starts talking about 'mini facelifts', 'sub-malar implants' (cheekbone implants) and suchlike, make your excuses and go find some Aquamid instead. What if you have too much facial fat as it is? Well first thing - don't gain any more weight! Slim people, so long as they aren't emaciated, look younger because if you don't have it - it can't sag! Mice on restricted calorie diets live longer too. Possibly because less food equals fewer toxins. Anyway, lose the weight either through diet and exercise or facial liposuction, have the loose skin removed and have any fat deficient areas augmented with fillers. Fat seems to be deposited in different areas as we age. In younger faces the weight is higher up - around the cheekbones. In older faces it tends to be around the jaw and neck. This is bad.
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