It can be receding, prominent or even prognathous, i.e. when the mandible protrudes with respect to the maxilla, the dental arches are misaligned and there are consequent breathing difficulties and speech problems. We’re talking about the chin.
There are several fairly straightforward aesthetic medicine and plastic surgery interventions that can reshape, increase or decrease the size of the chin, correcting its shape and projection. There are three levels.
The simplest involves one or more localized injections of a couple of volumizing fillers containing hyaluronic acid or calcium hydroxyapatite. The treatment takes just a few minutes, is ambulatory and allows the patient to immediately return to their usual activities. Slightly more involved is lipofilling, with which the cosmetic surgeon is able to reshape a chin that is too small or, on the contrary, too prominent, adding or removing, depending on the case, the excess adipose tissue taken from the hips and / or abdomen and suitably centrifuged.
It is a technique, performed under local anaesthesia, that should be carried out with great care and delicacy to sculpt the profile of the chin to the smallest detail. It has one extra advantage: fat grafting increases the vascularization of the skin, creating a new network of blood vessels that, in turn, improves the compactness and uniformity of the skin itself, especially if acne scars are present.
The incision leaves no visible signs due to both its small size and its strategic location under the chin. The infiltration of botulinum toxin (called Bocouture, Azzalure or Vistabex in Italy) is very interesting and widespread. It allows, as we can see in the published videos, the so-called cobblestone chin, or that particular shape of chin that is always contracted and gives the chin the particular unnatural conformation in which the muscle fibres are visible on the surface, to be flattened smooth.
At the end, a slight compression bandage is applied and then removed within a few hours. Any bruising and swelling will tend, in any case, to disappear within 4-5 days. Finally, the surgical operation itself. Genioplasty can be of two types: augmentation or reduction. The first case involves the insertion of a silicone implant of the most suitable size, through a small incision inside the mouth (thus leaving no visible scar).
It is completely performed under local anaesthesia, which can be associated with a varying degree of mild sedation. The dressing is removed after 3-4 days. Slight swelling will persist for about a week. The same process applies for the reductive genioplasty, thanks to which the specialist reduces excessive protrusion of the chin with the aid of a small burr connected to a micromotor, which allows the bone to be modelled with ease and precision. In this case, the localized swelling may persist for up to two weeks.