Hi, my name is Dr. Robert Antolak at TheGentleDentist.com. We are located out in Shelby, Michigan.  Basically at 22 Mile and Hays Road. Our phone number is 586-247-3500. Like to talk to you a little bit about facial aesthetics. You know, in dentistry, we focus so much on the teeth, the way the smile is, the whiteness of the teeth, the cosmetic dentistry. One thing is very often ignored are the facial aesthetics that come with the smile. We’ve got a smile there. But what is it surrounded by? It’s surrounded by lips. What are lips surrounded by? The lips are surrounded by the face, lips around it and the face has got sometimes, as we get older, we start showing some changes in this. And so what we like to do is, you know, if you imagine the beautiful, young, youth-looking smile, you want to have a face that’s going to complement that. So, what I like to do is to discuss that today.

So what are facial aesthetics? It’s basically, it’s making your appearance a little bit more youthful. You know, but not overdoing it, too, you know. Sometimes, people think about, Botox or dermal fillers and they look at someone who has a, a smile and they look totally plastic and totally fake, duck lips, and you just envision this. But it isn’t. It’s something that’s very subtly done. And so, what happens is over time, actually, is that we start losing the elasticity in our skin.  That takes place from bad problems like skin damage from the sun. You know, suntanning without sunscreen, from diseases, from smoking, smoking is really difficult on the,  skin because what it does is it reduces the amount of oxygen that goes to the layers of the skin.

And therefore, the collagen goes to this elasticity and all weight alteration. Also, when you lose weight, you go from a skin that’s stretched into a skin that obviously can’t support that, so. There’s some different things that can take place. So, what I’d like to do is discuss a little bit about that. On average, we lose about 1% per year of the amount of volume of collagen we have in our face. Especially after we reach the age of 50 years old, so what develops is we can get, as you lose this volume of skin, is the muscle you’ll notice is called the myria outline, it’s the little parentheses that you can sometimes see on commercials that develops and those marionette lines are things that take places. The skin looks cheap. And then you get around the chin, starts looking a little bit more bulbous. And so, what we can do with that is we can actually change some of that.

What I want to do first of all is talk about Botox. Botox is the material that is injected near the muscles and the skin and the elasticity in that skin is reduced when the skin becomes less elastic. So, basically, around the eyes, we have what’s called crow’s feet. We talk about the 11′s which take place here, right between the eyes, and when people frown you can see them. And the wrinkles on the face, here. So obviously I need Botox.

But to look more youthful in that is we can inject that between these areas of muscle, so the muscles from here to my forehead for example, they start to switch down like this and as it does it, as a more youthful person, the skin would, accommodate to that change. While as I get older, I’m 50, as I get older, this starts to act like this the purse thing, where the person starts to come together like that. What Botox actually does is relaxes the muscles so I don’t have as much movement in my face because the muscles aren’t as active so it does give a look like that because you just can’t express your muscle as much.  Botox lasts about 3 to 6 months, depending on the person and some of the habits that they have. But that’s good for the, like I said, forehead, the eyes where you get the wrinkles here and also for the stuff here.

Botox is used for the upper part of the face and we have what’s called dermal fillers. Dermal fillers are things like Juvenex, that’s what we use in our office and so, below here it actually is a dermal filler, so fill in the marionette lines here and then we’ll create more of a  more of an aesthetic, more youthful look with that and so it plumps out the skin. It’ll also do the lips, too. So if over time, the lips have shrunken down and gotten smaller, then we can do some things to plump the lips out.

Which will then, that lasts between 6 months and a year, something like that period of time. But what’s nice about that, when we combine it with aesthetic dentistry, we have a beautiful look and the smile. And also the architecture that develops around the smile. So it’s like a frame of a painting. So, if you are interested in any of these procedures, and you’ve seen advertisements on it. You said, hey, you know what? That looks like me and I want to have that done, you can give us a call for a free consultation. Our phone number is: (586) 247-3500. And our website is thegentledentist.com. Thank you.