Plastic Surgery Unplugged
with Dr. Raghu Athré: Episode 6

We’re back with a brand new episode of “Plastic Surgery Unplugged.” In this podcast series Dr. Athré leads conversations on industry secrets, plastic surgery procedures, and personal stories by professionals and patients.

In episode 6, Dr. Athré discusses two different procedures that are a bit less popular than your rhinoplasties and facelifts—chin augmentation and lateral cheek filler.

Listen on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or Google Podcasts—and don’t forget to check out our archive of episodes 1 through 5.

Don’t forget to subscribe and share with friends and family. Here’s episode 6: “Two Lesser Known Surgery Options.” Thanks for listening!

[Audio transcription via Rev.com]

Dr. Raghu Athré:

Hi. This is Dr. Raghu Athré with Athré Plastic Surgery. Welcome to another episode of our podcast.

One of the things that I have been asked many times, and I’ve decided to dedicate this podcast to, is lesser known plastic surgery procedures that are still very effective.

One of the procedures, in my opinion, that really does not get its due is the chin augmentation.

So as we take a look and see patients more and more, one of the things that I notice is that there’s a high incidence of deficiency of this area right in here. So how we assess deficiency in this area is I take a look at a patient in their profile and perfectly perpendicular to the camera with their head not tilted up or down, and what i’m really looking for is a vertical line drawn from the root of the nose down, or from the bottom of the lip down, and seeing where the chin is in relation to those two vertical lines. And that allows me to see whether or not that the chin is deficient.

Now one of the things that happens when the chin is deficient, or several things happen when the chin is deficient.

One, it makes the nose look bigger. It makes the bottom half of the face look a little smaller, so you look top heavy and it can make the neck look less defined. So many patients who come in asking for increased definition of the neck, yes some of them do have increased soft tissue here, but a lot of them also have a deficiency of the chin. So if you want a quick and dirty way to kind of give you that longer neck that is more defined, more sculpted, more swan like, a chin implant is one of the easiest ways to go ahead and get that rejuvenation.

It’s a procedure that takes about 20 minutes to do under local anesthesia. Downtime is a couple of days. You can get back to normal almost immediately and especially now with everyone wearing masks you can pretty much get back to doing most of your activities pretty darn quickly. It’s cheap. It’s in the sub $2500 range including the implant. It’s done once. It’s not something that you have to do over and over again so I think it’s a great procedure for someone who’s looking for more definition of the neck.

Now is it for everybody? No, because there are people who need additional procedures to really get definition of the neck and don’t need an additional volume in the chin but if you fall into the category where you have a slightly deficient chin, I think it’s a great option to get a high amount of return on a low amount of investment.

The second major procedure that I see, that kind of gives you a return on investment higher than anything else, is filler in this region right here. You’ve probably seen a lot of people that have the filled-in cheeks and kind of look very cat-like and that is exactly not what I’m talking about.

So filler in this lateral portion of the cheek is pretty easy to do. What I’m talking about is in this area right here. So as we age a couple of things happen. This soft tissue pad tends to kind of drop down a little bit and we lose a little bit of bony volume in this area based on both of those you end up with a little bit of a groove. I have a little bit right here and one very easy thing to do is put a little bit of filler in that region in order to re-volumize that area. It tends to make people look younger, more youthful, give them more volume, give them a nice accent to their cheek. It takes about 25 minutes to do.

The filler of choice that I really like to use is Restylane, I think it has the least amount of bruising and swelling in that area. I do like using a cannula to kind of cross lace the filler in there which makes it look a lot more natural. It takes about 25 minutes and lasts for about, I’d say, close to about eight to nine months before needing another touch up.

So both of these procedures I think are two separate procedures that are real easy, real quick, and give you a high amount of return, lower on the investment totem pole and really do work very well to rejuvenate the face.

So hopefully this has given you a few ideas as you think about things that you may want to consider and gives you some information that you can talk to your plastic surgeon more from a more educated standpoint.

Thank you again and until next time with our next podcast.