Looking great does not require surgery. There is a big paradigm shift right now in the cosmetic world of lot of
patients who are doing facelift, spending $10,000 to $15,000 to pull the skin back tight, they realize you still
look your age at sometime that is why procedures like Botox and fillers have become so popular. Particularly with
fillers you can put volume back in the face where volume is lost in the aging face. You have got a great filler
options like Restylane and Juvederm, those are both hyaluronic acid, they are natural sugars, they are
polysaccharides, you cannot be allergic to them, and they are great for filling out tear troughs and filling in
cheek, great around the nasolabial folds or smile lines and smoothen out vertical lip lines and putting natural
volume back into the lips. The patients today have great options when it comes to facial fillers. You do have you
temporary fillers like Juvederm and Restylane. You also have semi-permanent fillers like Sculptra. Sculptra is
poly-L-lactic acid, it is similar to absorbable sutures. It is great for filling in cheeks and nasolabial folds.
It was actually FDA approved for AIDS patient who would like no atrophy. So you can cosmetically rebuild an entire
face with it. One hundred percent people respond to poly-L-lactic acid and it will last you two to three years if
not longer. Another great filler would be Radiesse, that is an ideal filler for cheeks and rebuilding the
nasolabial fold, that type of filler will last you a little bit longer about a year to a year and a half. The
chemical makeup is calcium hydroxylapatite, basically it stimulates your collagen production as well and gives a
good foundation to the skin. This year there was an exciting breakthrough and a permanent implant filler with
ArteFill, that type of filler is called PMMA – it is polymethylmethacrylate. It is in a purified bovine collagen
carrier and it is considered a livable implant filler because it is constantly simulating your own collagen and it
is only FDA approved for nasolabial folds, the smile lines, and this type of filler will last you five to seven
years. The patients who are interested in longer lasting lip fillers do have the option to do Silikon 1000. With
Silikon, it is ophthalmic grade. It is the same thing that the ophthalmologist use for detached retinas and you
can use a microdroplet technique to rebuild the lips and basically what happens with Silikon is that they get
capsulated by collagen and kind of embeds into the lip matrix and feels like normal natural lips.