Making the Man Part II: Getting a Little Help from His Plastic Surgeon
Cosmetic surgery for men. The idea alone is repugnant to some. In this country, if you dye your hair, you are more vain than most, and even worthy of a little sarcasm. Think Mitt Romney or Wayne Newton.
Mitt Romney“, by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC Under 2.0*
Despite the stigma, cosmetic surgery for men continues to grow in the United States, and is a huge part of our practice. According to the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, in 2012, approximately 10 percent of procedures that were performed that year were performed on men. This number is up 106 % since 1997.
It’s not surprising. Studies have shown good looking people are hired more, promoted more often and even paid more. So what can a man do to keep up his looks? Let’s start in our office:
- Try Botox—to reduce the lines in the forehead, diminish an angry or concerned look by gently elevating the eyebrows, to turn up the corners of the lip or to diminish the crows’ feet The downside, this needs to be repeated every 3-4 months.
- Fillers can reduce bags under the eyes, hollowing in the temples and cheeks that can occur from exercise and the passage of time, reduce the nasolabial fold, improve scars from acne or old injuries. We also use fillers to make a jaw square or to firm up a weak chin.
- Lasers, peels or microneedling can perfect the surface of the skin and eliminate dark circles under the eyes and areas of sun damage from overexposure to the elements. All are way more effective than the creams you buy in drug or department stores.
Surgically, we can:
- Improve the upper and lower eyelid surgery—to clean up the bags and excess skin in the lower eyelids.
- Forehead reshaping procedures—the forehead can change shape with aging, and can be altered by hairline lowering procedures and by brow smoothing procedures.
- Microfollicular hair transplant—precise hair reimplantation procedures can now be performed so that there are virtually no signs that it was either harvested, or reimplanted, and look as realistic as real hair.
- Liposuction—outpatient or in-office surgery under local anesthesia to improve contours by removing fat and resculpturing. The most common areas in our practice are the neck and jawline, the abdomen and love handles, and male breasts.
- Chin implants –an approximately 30 minute procedure to strengthen the profile.
Subtle changes, ones that few who look at you will pick up as changes, but ones that produce minimal, subliminal changes are the goal. And no one will know, unless you tell them.
In my next blog, I’ll explain how the same procedures are done very differently in men versus women.
*The photographs shown in this article above depict public figures. The use of these images is to illustrate the common use of plastic surgery. The author’s views in this article are entirely his own and may not reflect the views of the source of these images.
