Facial fat transfer, also called fat grafting, can rejuvenate your face by moving fat from one part of your body to your face. This softens the signs of aging and enhances your facial contours, giving you a more balanced and attractive appearance.
What is Facial Fat Transfer?
Your face is made up of different layers, starting with the skin, followed by subcutaneous tissue, and deeper down are muscles, fat pads, and bone. Malar fat can drop as we age, causing hollowing of the eyes and cheeks as well as deepening of the nasolabial folds. Generalized loss of subcutaneous fat leads to sagging skin that lacks volume and suppleness.
Replacing fat in your face can be essential for improving its overall appearance as well as improving the results of a surgical procedure such as a facelift, brow lift, or eye lift. For example:
- Temporal Fat grafting: Add fullness above your cheeks.
- Buccal and Malar Fat Grafting: Give roundness to your cheeks.
- Perioral Fat Grafting: Soften the smile lines from your nose-to-mouth corners and mouth-to-chin lines
- Periorbital Fat Grafting: Fill the areas around your eyes.
As you age, these fat pads can shift and decrease, also affecting the shape of your face. Joweling and loss of upper volume cause an oval or square. Facial fat transfer involves taking fat from one part of your body (usually the abdomen or thighs) and injecting it into your face. This procedure aims to restore volume and create a more youthful look. The process involves three main steps:
- Harvesting: Fat is gently removed from areas with excess fat, like the thighs, gluteal region, or abdomen.
- Purification: The removed fat is processed and purified for injection.
- Injection: The purified fat is then strategically injected into specific areas of your face.
Fat can be processed into different-sized pieces (regular, micro, and nano fat), which allows for a tailored approach and a smoother result. In addition, while all fat has stem cells, a nano fat purification process increases the stem cell component, leading to regenerative changes to the skin independent of volume.