Have you ever seen your profile in a picture and wished you could change something about your jawline? There are three aspects that make up a perfect jawline: How strong your chin is, if you have jowls (or not), and if you have fullness under your chin (sometimes called a “double chin”). There are solutions to each of these problems, but they are different, and choosing the right one can be complicated. We’ll talk about them one at a time.
Jowls
As we get older, our skin sags under the influence of gravity. Nowhere is this more visible than in the jawline. The perfect jawline is a straight line from the ear to the chin, but as we age, the skin will commonly ‘break’ away from the bone and begin sagging down near the corners of our mouths, forming what that is commonly called ‘jowls’.
Jowls can be difficult to treat. We basically have three options: fillers, skin tightening, or surgery.
Let’s use an example. If you had a slipcover for your couch that kept bunching up and sagging, you could do a couple of things to make it fit tighter. You could put more stuffing into the couch, you could put the slipcover in the dryer to shrink the fabric and get the fit you want, or you could get out scissors and make the slipcover smaller by cutting away excess fabric.
The same three tricks work for jowls too. You can use fillers like Voluma or Juvederm along the jawline to smooth away the ‘notch’ formed by sagging skin, you can use microneedling or lasers to tighten the skin so that it no longer sags, or a surgeon can do a neck lift – cutting away the excess skin. All have pluses and minuses, and none are perfect. Come into Restor and ask us which solution is the right one for you!
Double Chin
Fullness under the chin, also called a ‘double chin’, is another common problem we have with our jawlines. It used to be that the only option for people with a double chin was liposuction – with all the risks and downsides that went along with that. Now we finally have an injectable, non-invasive option that takes all of 15 minutes to do: Kybella.
Kybella is a molecule that breaks down fat calls, allowing the body to flush them away. It is fast, effective, and best of all, permanent! Someone with only a small to moderate amount of fullness (such as the model in the pictures above) will need 3 treatments, 8 weeks apart. Someone with more fullness will need more – up to 6 or 7 – but can still be helped.
Weak chin
Every wonder why Angelina Jolie is considered so undeniably beautiful? It’s all about proportions – and hers are almost perfect. The ideal proportion for a chin is that it should reach as far forward as the outside of the lower lip. One common profile problem is when the chin sits behind the lips. This leads to a soft profile, and ‘bunching’ of skin under the chin and along the jawline.
The solution to a weak chin is to strengthen it with fillers such as Juvederm or Voluma. You can use dermal fillers on the tip of the chin to add support and structure as in the picture above. Not only does this make the profile appear more balanced, but it will also ‘pull out’ the skin along the whole jawline, leading to an elegant and chiseled appearance. This simple, in-office procedure takes about 15 minutes, and lasts 1-2 years.
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