Chin Liposuction, FaceTite and Recovery: What Dr. Smith Discusses
In this edited interview, Dr. Smith discusses chin liposuction, loose skin, FaceTite and VASER. He also describes incision placement, early swelling and how results develop over time.
Key takeaways
- The discussion distinguishes excess fat from loose skin when considering a neck and jawline treatment.
- Dr. Smith discusses when FaceTite or a neck lift may enter the conversation.
- The video separates early recovery and swelling from the later development of results.
Explore your options
Related videos
Video transcript
Transcript from the source video’s English caption track. The interviewer’s name is replaced with [interviewer]. Recovery examples are part of this recorded discussion; follow your own surgical team’s instructions.
0:00 So for the first week, you are bigger than you are right now. At one week, you will come in to have your sutures removed and say, I look exactly the same, doc. What did you do? You're gonna have to wear this white compression garment that kind of wraps around your head for 48 hours, depending on whether or not we use energy. And we can talk about that. But if we're not using energy, it's just 48 hours and you're done. So really, we say 48 hours of social downtime. So a lot of our patients are kind of busy office people.
0:28 And they'll do this on a Friday and then they can get back to work on Monday. That's a really reasonable expectation. Yeah, so it's different for everybody. But for the vast majority of people, I will let people get back to a light workout at four or five days and a full workout after two weeks. When we talk about kind of contouring the neck and jawline, there are two main things that we look at. We look at how much fat is there? Is there extra fat kind of getting in the way of seeing a nice shape? And is there loose skin?
0:53 And if we get the sense that someone has nice tight skin, all we need to do is remove the fat. We do that with simple straightforward liposuction or tumescent liposuction. If on the other hand, we find that someone has loose skin, if it's really loose, then we shouldn't be doing a minimally invasive procedure at all. If it's really loose skin, then we need to talk about a neck lift. But if someone has mild to moderate skin laxity or loose skin, we can treat that very effectively with energy.
1:19 And the energy that you know, we use for this most frequently is radiofrequency energy, bipolar radiofrequency energy. And this is a device called FaceTite. And that very thin prong goes under the skin through one of our three little incisions. The bigger one goes over your skin. And if [interviewer]'s hand is your skin, you can imagine that it's actually passing energy across your skin from one probe to the other, heating the skin and making it contract in a very controlled way.
1:46 So that's our go-to for kind of mild to moderate skin laxity in the neck. Another kind of energy that we really like to use, and this is something that almost anyone can benefit from is Vaser. And Vaser is ultrasound energy. So while the FaceTite is great for skin tightening, Vaser is good for kind of deep tissue tightening. And I like it a lot for that. The three little incisions that I mentioned, the great thing about chin contouring is we can do it in a virtually invisible way.
2:14 Each incision is smaller than a pen cap. One goes right there, and one goes behind each earlobe. And that's it. And they heal up in such a way that you really cannot even tell. And like [interviewer] said, for the first week or so, you're going to be swollen, you have numbing fluid in place, and there's just swelling from having had a procedure done. So after that first week, you'll go back to looking pretty much like you did before we did anything. It's really at two or three weeks where you're going
2:40 to start to look at the mirror and be like, oh, yeah, that looks kind of neat. And it really takes about three months to see the majority of the result of these procedures. And, you know, you could even continue to see improvement for up to six months, especially after these energy-based procedures, because it really does take time for that collagen and elastin to grow and for everything to kind of shrink down and really wrap itself to the contour that we achieve. So the expectation should be nice subtle change after a few weeks,
3:08 but full dramatic result does take a few months. But please get in touch or hit us up in the comments and let us know if there's anything else you'd like to know about chin liposuction. So thanks for tuning in and don't forget to like this video.