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Dr. Edward Buckingham: Good morning. Today we're going to talk a little
bit about hyaluronic acid fillers and specifically Restylane. There are
other brands of hyaluronic acid fillers such as Juvederm and Perlane, but
today we're going to focus specifically on Restylane.

So what is hyaluronic acid? Hyaluronic acid is really nothing more than a
big sugar molecule in our body. It's technically a mucopolysaccharide. It's
a naturally occurring molecule. It's in our skin. It's in our joints, all
throughout our body. And as we age, our hyaluronic acid content decreases
along with collagen and other products, which tends to lead to wrinkling
and involution of the tissues.

So part of the restoration process is to place hyaluronic acid back into
the tissues. There's topical hyaluronic acids and oral hyaluronic acids and really none of that works. You can't get it there unfortunately without
injecting it directly into the skin. And so you do that unfortunately with
a needle, but there are ways to minimize that by using local anesthetics
and things to decrease that.

So hyaluronic acid is produced through a process of bacterial fermentation.
The product itself is throughout all species of animals, so bacteria and
any other animal you can mention. So they utilize bacteria in a very safe
process that doesn't use any animal sacrifices or anything to that to
produce the product. It gets placed into a syringe, and then we inject it
into the tissues. So it's a very, very natural restorative process of
something that's already there that you're losing over time.

Now one of the other things that people worry about when they're talking
about fillers is the unnatural look. And we've all seen those people that
are walking down the street with their lips blown out, and you just look at
them and go, "Wow, that really looks unnatural." But what you don't know is
there are all those people that are walking down the street who are older
that look great and you're just looking at them going, "Wow, I don't know
how that person maintains themselves." Well, in all likelihood, they've
been to see somebody who really knows what they're doing and have done an
injection of this product in a balanced way.

And so as long as you're using this and injecting it and not just filling
up one part of the lip, for example, you can put some in the lip and then
balance it to the surrounding tissues, get a nice plump, restorative,
youthful look without that done appearance. So that's what we're trying to
do, is to take a natural product in a very minimally invasive way to restore
what's missing and get everybody looking better but natural.

What is Hyaluronic Acid?

Dr. Edward Buckingham discusses what hyaluronic acid is, specifically Restylane.