Understanding your facial anatomy when we use fillers and anti-wrinkle injections

Understanding what lies beneath what we know of as our ‘face’ is interesting and complex, and how our cosmetic injections interact with this to create different effects is truly marvellous. 

There is an intricate web of muscles, nerves, blood vessels and bone underneath our faces, meaning that any treatments must take this delicate infrastructure into deep consideration. Anyone injecting your face with dermal fillers or anti-wrinkle injections really needs to know what they’re doing, or serious complications can be the result. At ENRICH, only cosmetic dermatologists – highly trained doctors – inject.

There are certain facial structures that we perform certain tasks on at a cosmetic dermatology clinic, to obtain specific effects. That might be anti-wrinkle injections to help smooth out wrinkles. In the case of crow’s feet, we want to inject specific muscles that don’t bring down the eyebrows, so for a lift and anti-wrinkle effect, we have to do some juggling of what muscle does what – muscles that will act on behalf of other muscles to lift and smooth, all at once, without a loss of facial expression. No mean feat!

Sometimes we have to exercise great caution in injecting, and inject near to the area we want, not directly into it, and then massage the solution into the tissue to get the desired effect, to avoid injecting into a blood vessel. The trick is to know where to stop. To do this, we use bony landmarks to understand where we are on your face, since our faces are made up more or less the same way when it comes to the landmarks no matter what our face looks like on the outside.

When we inject folds, like laugh lines or frown lines, which have tightly bound tissue tucked into them, we inject deep with dermal fillers, being careful to avoid arteries and veins that are nearby. With lips, we might use a combination of treatments, avoiding the wet side of your lips.

Bad things could happen if your injector isn’t on top of their craft:

• Injection of a substance into a blood vessel that supplies the eyes, causing blindness – these vessels have no valves and clots can occur
• Skin necrosis – that is, the death of cells due to lack of blood supply – can occur when filler blocks blood supply to a low-supply area (say the end of the nose)
• Blocking off the wrong nerve with anti-wrinkle injections – incorrectly applied injections can cause relaxation of the wrong muscles (for three months!)
• Overdoing it on the anti-wrinkle injections – over time can cause weakening of facial muscles and loss of muscle tone and facial expressions

We are expert cosmetic dermatologists.
Contact us