Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Articles

You may not know Munroe Bergdorf by name, but you’ve likely seen her fronting any number of beauty campaigns. After years of relying on makeup and fillers, Bergdorf recently underwent facial feminization surgery.

“Your face is how you look at other people, and it’s how you see yourself. You can’t get away from it. When I’d look in the mirror and notice some primary male characteristics, it would make me feel like I wasn’t seeing who I really was,” Burgdorf said in interview with Refinery29. “One of the biggest things that used to freak me out was dressing rooms, because the lighting is so horrendous. There was just something about the way the light hit my brow ridge and showed the width of my chin and nose.”

What is facial feminization surgery?

Facial feminization surgery is an umbrella term that encompasses a broad range of plastic surgery procedures to change masculine facial features into feminine features with the aim of helping transgender women transition physically to their self-affirmed gender.

The surgery can include, among other procedures:

• Nose reshaping: Typically involves reducing the overall size of the nose and its angles.
• Eyelid modification: Excess tissue can be cut away to feminize the upper eyelids.
• Lip lift and augmentation: A lift can shorten the distance between the lip and the nose and create a shorter, more curled lip. While fillers or fat from another part of the body can plump the lips.
• Cheek augmentation: Women tend to have prominent cheeks because they have a greater concentration of fat in the area. Implants or fat from another part of the body can be used to alter the size and shape of the cheeks.
• Mandibular angle reduction: By sculpting or removing outer layers from the lower jaw, the jaw can be reduced and narrowed.
• Chin width reduction: A small wedge of bone is removed to shorten and narrow the chin.
• Tracheal shave: With a small, well-hidden incision, the thyroid cartilage, or Adam’s apple, can be reduced and reshaped.

‘I feel the best I ever have’

“Facial feminization surgery isn’t talked about as much as sex reassignment surgery. People don’t understand how valuable and important facial feminization is,” “Vanderpump Rules” star Billie Lee told Refinery29. “A lot of trans women decide to get facial feminization done way before their sex assignment surgery, or choose not to get sexual assignment surgery at all, and I think that’s really beautiful and brave.”

Both Burgdorf and Lee said they reached a point in their lives where facial feminization surgery stopped being an option and it became, instead, a lifeline.

About a year removed from her surgery, Burgdorf said, “I feel the best I ever have. I didn’t realize how dysmorphic I was about my body until I got that surgery. I didn’t know how much I was holding back in regards to intimacy, either. If you can’t feel a connection with your body, how can you form a connection with somebody else? Getting closer to how I saw myself allowed me to get closer to other people, too.”

Lee echoed the sentiment. “Shortly after the surgery, I was out having fun with friends and I walked past a bathroom mirror and saw myself and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s me,’ ” she said. “Even now, I still have these really powerful moments where I catch my reflection in a store window and it fills me with so much gratitude.”

Too many of us are familiar with the dark circles that can appear under our eyes following a restless night or two. For a surprisingly large portion of that group, however, those circles are a constant, not necessarily because they’re poor sleepers, but because they were simply born that way.

If you count yourself among them, you may have noticed that eye creams and serums only help so much. And that’s because the reason behind the circles’ presence is mostly genetic. Sure, the vicious cycle of tossing and turning at night and overcompensating with too much coffee during the day isn’t helping matters. But those under-eye circles really have more to do with the composition of your skin and the way the light reflects off your orbital bone.

“I didn’t start to notice the dark hollows until I got older, but my baby photos prove that I’ve had them since birth,” says Danielle Gray, a 37-year-old style and beauty writer, in an essay explaining why she got filler to treat her under-eye circles. “[W]hile my under-eye circles have never crippled my self-esteem, they have been hard to ignore, given my line of work.”

Fighting nature with a natural ingredient

If, like Danielle, you’ve only recently become fixated on your under-eye circles, it may be because they become more prominent as we age. Doctors refer to them as tear troughs. The skin around our eyes is thinner and paler and lacks the proper fat restores, so the indentations grow a little deeper, giving the eyes a more tired appearance.

Discouraging as that may sound, it’s actually fairly easy to remedy—in the right hands. With a small layer of precisely placed hyaluronic acid gel, the delicate skin is lifted up and away from the blood vessels under the eyes.

Hyaluronic acid is a natural part of the skin’s dermis, but it diminishes as we age, which causes the hollowing effect under the eyes. The filler helps pull water to the site of the injection, creating a plumper under-eye and a rejuvenated appearance.

The placement of the injections is critical. The filler needs to be planted quite deep so it isn’t visible under the delicate under-eye skin. (A topical numbing agent can be applied beforehand to ease any discomfort, and it’s a very small needle, so the injections are virtually painless.) Which makes finding a board-certified plastic surgeon with lots of experience with the procedure critical to a good outcome.

If the idea of getting injections around your eyes is still a bit daunting, lasers can also help with dark circles, especially if they’re caused by visible blood vessels.

‘Do what makes you happy’

“Once I was healed completely, I was in love,” Danielle says. “My dark hollows were gone and I was thrilled with the way I looked with and without makeup.”

Within a day or two of the hyaluronic acid treatment, your eyes will appear noticeably brighter—though the change will be subtle enough that you’ll be the only one able to spot the difference. That effect should last anywhere from six months to a year, depending on how quickly you metabolize the filler and the type that was used.

“Over the years, I’ve learned that you can use a little something to preserve your skin—whether it’s sunscreen, a chemical peel, or, in my case, under-eye filler,” Danielle says. “The key, in my opinion, is to make informed decisions about the choices you are making for you. Do your research and, ultimately, do what makes you happy.”