Suzanne Somer’s Facial Injections:  Oh My God!

Recently, I performed a fat transfer on a lady from Houston who showed me a photograph of Suzanne Somer’s during our preoperative visit the day before the procedure.  She had already sent me an email terribly worried about the procedure, asking whether I would make her look like some of the celebrities out there who were overfilled.

When she brought the image into me, the first thing that I could see were gigantic cheeks staring at me.  Of course, they looked too big and unbalanced.  But were they too big?  I proceeded to cover up the bottom half of the face, and surprisingly she did not look that bad.  You can try that trick yourself with this photo.  I then scratched out her brows with a pen, and overall she looked young and natural.  I am not saying that her cheeks are not overfilled but a problem that is not recognized is that her cheeks are not balanced with the rest of the face.  Her buccal area (the area below the cheeks) are hollow making her cheeks look even bigger.  Her brow area also had not been filled so that the upper eyelid area looks hollow making the cheeks look unbalanced.  Adding fat to the other parts of the face would certainly provide better balance and more harmony to her face.

Also recently, I had a lady come to me from New York City who wanted her lips corrected because her top lip was marred from fat grafting, Gore-Tex, and Bellafill(Artefill).  However, what struck me more than anything else was how big her cheeks that made her entire face disfigured and unbalanced.  I asked her what she had done.  She said she had fat grafting performed into her cheek area to correct acne scars, which I believe is entirely absurd as fat is too soft to make an improvement in her type of ice-pick scars.  Instead of improving her condition, her face just looked overbloated.  Being wary of additional fat grafting given her bad experience, I opted to treat her with fillers instead.  I placed cosmetic injectable fillers in her brow, temple, upper eyelid, buccal area, anterior chin, and prejowl.  When I saw her a few months later, I was shocked at how much more natural and balanced she looked.  Really understanding how to create balance in a face is so very important.

Samuel M. Lam, MD, FACS is a board certified facial plastic surgeon in Dallas, Texas. To learn more about Dr Lam’s fat grafting procedures please call 972.312.8105 to schedule a consultation. If you would like to ask Dr Lam a question about fat grafting please visit our fat grafting forum.