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  • Strong Cheeks Make For a Youthful Face — Cheek Augmentation in 20 Minutes
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So here's a little known secret. The cheeks are key in making attractive faces. Having strong cheekbones helps make you look younger and better, and the incredible thing is that we can currently augment your cheeks here in the office in about 20 minutes.

So today I'd like to talk to you about how we do that.

So cheek augmentation is something that can be done in the office with fillers. Cheek augmentation can help reduce the shadowing under the eyes. It can make faces more attractive in general, and can help them look more youthful.

So let's look at an example of treating the cheeks in the tear trough area. This is a woman who had some shadowing under her eyes and we have used fillers both to treat her tear trough area and the lateral cheek area, and those two areas combined have given her a refreshed and yet natural appearance.

This is another example of a woman who had shadowing under her eyes, which has improved with cheek augmentation.

So what are the fillers? The fillers are a gel-like substance that's normally found in the skin. One of the first fillers, Restylane, was first approved by the FDA in 2003. Fillers are used to reduce wrinkles, fill grooves and to contour the face.

So what do we mean by contouring the face? Well, fillers can be used a lot like makeup has been used, where a makeup artist may use makeup to highlight an area or contour an area by changing the shadows and the light reflection on the face. Fillers can go one step further and actually contour the face by adding peaks to the cheeks or areas that we want to advance and thereby reducing the areas that we want to de-emphasize.

So here's an example of that, of cheek contouring. This is a hair stylist in her 30s. She was noticing some shadows under her eyes.

Here she is after the treatment. You can see we've augmented her cheeks. She still looks like herself, but she looks fabulous.

This is her looking the other way.

Again, we have treated both the shadowing under her eyes, but we have also augmented her cheeks.

This is an example of a gentleman who has had both cheek and chin augmentation. You can see these things together can make him look more youthful. He's got more life in his face and he looks better.

So here's an example of using fillers to actually turn back the clock or make a face look more youthful. This is a woman who had begun to run recently and she noticed some weight loss. She saw some advanced aging. She brought in this picture of herself from nine years prior.

So after our filler treatments, and this is a combination of treatments. We have done fillers to her cheek, Botox to the forehead and some fillers to the chin. When you look at her before picture from nine years ago you can see we've gotten her pretty close to that and in some ways even a little better, because her cheeks are more prominent than they used to be.

Here's a frontal view showing her fresh look.

Another example of a patient looking for a refreshed look, and again, by treating her cheeks under her eyes we were able to make her look more youthful and make her look on the outside the way she feels on the inside.

So this brings me to a point that comes up. A lot of patients ask, "Well, what about my nasolabial folds?"

This shows the evolution of my thinking about fillers for the face. This is a patient shown in 2004 with deep nasolabial folds. We see her here in 2006 after two years of treatment. We had really gotten those nasolabial folds away and back at that time I was really proud of this result and had it on my brochures, my website.

But in 2010 I began to turn my attention away from the nasolabial folds and more of an upward direction in treating under the eyes and the cheek area. I think you will agree that she actually looks better in 2010 than she did in 2006. So I think in answer to the question of nasolabial folds versus cheeks, you can treat both, but the emphasis should be on the cheeks and then treating the nasolabial folds second.

This is an example of a challenging case where we use fillers. It's challenging because he has several things going on under his eyes. He has thin skin, which makes the area dark. We can't treat the thin skin. He has a deep tear trough. He has bulging fat under the eye and he has low cheek bones.

One of the advantages of our office is that we're able to offer him a combination of non-surgical and surgical options for this tough case.

So the first thing we did was to remove some of the bulging fat from his eyes, and you can see that the bulging fat is gone. But he still has the indentations and still has the low cheekbone.

So the next thing I did was to add fillers, both to the tear trough and to the cheek area, and here we see him afterwards. Through a combination of these procedures we have been able to remove the shadowing, remove the bulging fat and augment his cheekbones and give him a better look.

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Strong Cheeks Make For a Youthful Face — Cheek Augmentation in 20 Minutes

Dr. David Mabrie explains how you can plump up your cheeks without surgery thanks to Juvederm and Restylane.