Many of our patients come into our office requesting procedures, but often they are unfamiliar with what is really going on behind-the-scenes. To keep things as transparent as possible, Dr. Davis takes time to reveal in-office photos during two different surgeries. In this week’s video, you will learn about eyelid surgery as well as a brow lift. Please keep in mind these videos are graphic and should be viewed with caution.
There are a number of different things regarding facial anatomy that go into cosmetic surgery, and we are proud to share them with you. If you have any questions about these procedures, contact us here.
[Transcript]
Hi everyone, Dr. Steven Davis. Listen, we’ve got a lot of things to talk about when it comes to going to see someone for different kinds of procedures and injectables and where they all come together.
So what I wanted to talk about today was something about really understanding the area that’s being injected with all these fillers and botox-type of products, and I always really, really, really enjoy showing my patients what the anatomy looks like of what I’m trying to actually inject with fillers, by showing them what an actual surgery would look like if they decided, let’s not do any more injectables, or let’s just augment some of the injectables by doing the surgical procedure.
So in this podcast and video combination that we’re gonna put together, I’m gonna put together some photos from the operating room so that you can see what I’m talking about. One of the things that I always know that patients wanna understand is when we’re injecting things like Botox, and Newtox, and Dysport, into the areas of the face, where is that muscle that we’re trying to affect?
And in a few of the photos that you’ll see, accompanying this video, you’ll be able to see that right underneath the skin, in a lot of places around the forehead and around the eyes, the muscle is so closely attached that you really don’t have to go very deeply with a needle in order to make a difference and to really get the product into the muscle that you’re trying to choose to inject.
And in this first picture that you’ll see, we’re actually in the frontalis muscle of the forehead, and we were doing a brow lift, which is a great operation, when really, after a long period of time of using a lot of different kinds of neuromodulators, or things like Botox, and you’re constantly trying to get the person’s eyebrows to really go back up to where they used to be, it’ll reach a point, because of age and gravity, that it’s just not gonna happen anymore, and you can use as much Botox as you want, but it’s never gonna get that really hanging or ptotic brow to be lifted up enough, and that’s what you’re gonna see in this photo.
You’ll actually see that we did a lateral brow lift where we actually made an incision in the hairline. I was able to come down to where the orbital rim is, and then actually lift the skin and the tissues higher up, and tack it into place, and the beauty of this operation is that it’s a direct-result type of an operation.
We’re literally trying to get the lateral part of the brow to be lifted up. It’s not what we used to do, which was a coronal brow lift, which was an incision from basically the top of the ear all the way across to the other side of your head, to the other top of the ear, and then we actually pulled the whole brow up.
Nowadays, because we have things like Botox, we don’t really need to do that involved of an operation. What we’re really trying to do is go after the culprit here, which is the ptosis brow coming down from the lateral aspect, so if we can use Botox to just make that happen, that’s wonderful, but once that starts to not be enough for a lot of people.
This lateral brow lift is a great operation, and you’ll see, right underneath the skin, after you go to what we call the subcutaneous fat, the muscle, the frontalis muscle, is right there, and that’s really what we’re trying to address when we have all these horizontal lines that go across your skin, that’s due to the horizontal movement that you’re seeing, because that frontalis muscle keeps kind of creasing up that zone. So you’ll see where Botox actually gets injected.
You’ll also see, in another set of photos, what we’re doing when we’re doing an eyelid surgery, ’cause we did that as well, and you’ll see that once there’s too much eyelid skin above that lash line, no amount of Botox, no amount of filler, is really ever gonna make that extra skin go away.
So what we do here is we make a very subtle incision that’s actually in the crease of your eyelid, and then take away the extra skin, the extra fat that a lot of times is billowing over there, and also a little bit of muscle that’s redundant in that area, so your eyelid looks smooth, and all you women that are interested in putting eyeshadow and eye-makeup on, you’ll know it becomes very difficult to be able to get that stuff in there, once you have this operation it all gets cleaned up and it looks beautiful.
But again, the muscle that’s in action in that area is the orbicularis oculi muscle, and that muscle is the other one that we’re injecting with Botox to try to make all the crows feet and other lines go away.
So I hope you enjoy some of the photos that you’ll see. They’re very authentic, right from the operating room, but that’s one of the great things about plastic surgery, is that I get the opportunity to not only do an in-office type of treatment like injectables with fillers and Botox and lasers, but I can also take you to the operating room and do some of these more exciting type of surgical procedures.
So until we talk again, I’m Dr. Steven Davis.
Dr. Steven Davis of Davis Cosmetic Plastic Surgery in Cherry Hill, New Jersey wants to ensure the comfort of all patients, which begins with education. We hope our video series can provide useful information for those with upcoming appointments or interested in the behind-the-scenes action of plastic surgery.
Thank you for watching Dr. Steven Davis discuss the facial anatomy behind Botox and fillers. If you want more content in audio format, please check out The Plastic Surgery Revolution. Also, check out Dr. Steven Davis on Instagram, Facebook & Twitter!