Sculpted cheeks fashion or faux pas?
High cheekbones and sculpted faces have always been a sign of beauty that represent youth and health. But as we age the face especially the cheeks change. You might think it’s just the skin that is affected, but it’s not. The muscles and bone show changes too. Lax muscles lay on top of bone that has thinned out over time and the result is sunken cheeks with slackness, deep nasolabial folds and a sagging jawline. There are ways to halt and reverse this problem and I often perform a combination of PDO thread lifts to pull the muscles and skin to a more youthful position and add dermal fillers to plump. Longer term fillers like Sculptra are also great because they work over a long time to stimulate the collagen. Morpheus8 RF Microneedling can help texture and tone tighten those slackened ares beautifully.
So now the cheeks are looking youthful again. But what happens if the cheeks are not gaunt but a little bit too plump? Well, in some instances the cheek or buccal fat can be removed surgically. We have all seen those photos of Demi Moore strutting down the catwalk with very bizarrely defined cheeks that looked sculpted out chunks from upper cheek straight into the corners of her mouth. It is alleged she had this procedure to make her cheeks look sleek. Only she can tell us if she had buccal fat removal, but what it did do was spark the debate on cheeks and how they should look.
For me personally I do not think it is a great look and adds a strange grinning look to the mouth that appears unnatural. I think cheeks look best when they gently slope from upper to lower mid face and when they do not add too much width to the face but plump and soften. The other red flag for me is the fat cannot be put back, when it’s gone it’s gone! Since we lose fat in the face as we age, buccal fat removal can create an older looking gaunt face, faster. So for me it’s not fab just a faux pas.
Non-invasive and safer options like the ones I mentioned earlier can do the same thing! One of my patients told me that as a younger woman she hated her bigger cheeks or chipmunk cheeks as she called them, but now she’s glad because her fuller face doesn’t look older than it should.
"I think cheeks look best when they gently slope from upper to lower mid face and when they do not add too much width to the face but plump and soften."
