Does botox swell? Does hyaluronic acid paralyze? Can you do botox on my lower face?
In our daily lives as doctors and cosmetic surgeons sometimes questions like these really surprise us, we think how it may be possible that patients still have these doubts given all the information that revolves about aesthetic medicine and the surprise is maximum when a patient gives it to you who for years has made botox and fillers from other colleagues. Instead it happens often and in my case I appreciate the patients who have the courage to ask for it.
Today I will tell you about fillers. Often in Italy we use the English term filler when perhaps it would be clearer to speak of fillers, in fact the approximate translation of filler in Italian would be “filler”. So in aesthetic medicine filler is any substance that can fill or create volume.
What can we use fillers for? On the face we can use fillers to fill small wrinkles, those that are created over the years and that are caused by the continuous movement of the muscles of the face, but in this case we are not paralyzing or blocking anything, we are only filling the skin of the wrinkle to create a more spent and therefore more resistant subcutaneous tissue against the continuous squeezing of moving muscles. With fillers we can also fill the furrows of the face and by furrows we mean linear areas where the face has lost volume due to aging as usually happens in the furrows that form between the nose and mouth, on both sides of this, but the furrows can also occur in young people who are not aged, being part of the natural conformation of their face, the best example is that of the furrow that sometimes is created under the eye, in the eye area, generating a depression that can be whether or not accompanied by the dark color of the eyes. And last but not least, fillers can be used to create volumes, as is done to increase the lips or to increase the cheekbones.
So, is hyaluronic acid a filler? It can be, but it isn’t always.
Think of how many hyaluronic acid moisturizers you buy in perfumeries that don’t fill, only moisturize. The fundamental characteristic of the hyaluronic acid molecule is to hydrate the tissues without filling absolutely anything, but in the laboratories through different chemical procedures they can create hyaluronic acid gels with filling capacity and these gels are what we call hyaluronic acid fillers. Currently, the fillers most frequently used in aesthetic medicine are those of hyaluronic acid, but there are other fillers formulated with other molecules and chemical compounds.
Are all hyaluronic acid fillers the same? No!!! The hyaluronic acid gels created in the laboratory can be more or less dense, more or less elastic, more or less fillers, giving us different products and therefore it will be up to the doctor to choose the most suitable product to treat every area of the face and every blemish, we will not be able use the same acid to increase a cheekbone or to fill a small fine line.
For the moment I stop here, the theme of fillers can be very long and complex, but I hope I have been clear and that at least you have understood that fillers do not paralyze anything. In the next post of this blog I will talk about botox and so you can perfectly understand the difference between one substance and another.