Today we are going to talk about the jowls.
Every day thousands of people visit dermatologists to treat their jowls. The jowl is one of the hardest areas in the face to target as you are aging, not just in terms of creams, not just in terms of at-home devices, not just in terms of minimally invasive in-office treatments, and also in terms of going under the knife, even when you get a facelift or any other kind of operations, this area of the face is very hard to fully address.
What Exactly are Jowls? When Do You Start to Notice Them?
As we age it’s never just a one problem thing that is happening at once, it is multifactorial, and many different things are happening. We have our bone structure, we have the cushion, which is all of the fat and the muscle, and then we have the skin, which is the fabric surrounding it all.
As we get wiser in life, the first thing to happen is our cushion starts to get less plump, as this is going on, our bone structure also starts to shift. The bony part around our eyes gets a little bit wider, our cheeks get a little bit thinner, our jawline becomes a little bit narrower and pulls back, and to top it off our skin becomes a little bit more lax.
Sun damage, age, tugging, pushing, pulling, expression, you name it, life(!) takes a toll on the fabric.
As we age, things start to shift, shrink, and drop around a base that is also getting a bit thinner and falling, and eventually, our face kind of falls down. And we start to notice the jowls. But the interesting part is based on my explanation you would think that this comes last, no!
Peaks of Aging
There are three peaks of aging in life.
Peak 1
The first peak happens in your early 30s maybe late 20s where you notice over the course of 6 months something is not quite the same with your face and maybe you feel like your face is now front face forward and there is like nothing over the sides.
Peak 2
A second peak of life happens in your late 30s where over the course of a month, most people feel like their face doesn’t look right, something is off. When you speak you see like your cheek is pulling, you notice a little bit of heaviness, you see that you’re a little bit flatter, like you just notice it over the course of a month, it’s a little bit more drastic and it happens a little bit faster.
Peak 3
And the last peak of life is in your mid-40s, that doesn’t mean you end there. It just means that change happens overnight and people say “I don’t recognize myself anymore”.
After that you kind of accept it and decide either you’re going to do something to help yourself about it, or you’re just going to accept it as it is, and you’re just not going deal with it, or you are dealing with it and you’re just not talking about it.
The reality is these are the three big peaks of aging.
The jowls become noticeable in between the first and second peaks. You may not notice it in the first peak, but you definitely notice it when you hit the second peak of life.
How Can This Blog Help You Help Yourself?
We are going to continue this blog by talking about, the most minimally invasive which are things you could do at home, to things you can do in office and beyond. Because jowls do take a toll on your face, it makes you feel and look bottom-heavy.
Facial Massages at Home
At home, you could start with facial massages. Are facial massages going to get rid of the problem? Absolutely not, they are not going to get rid of the problem.
If someone says facial massages and facial yoga are the answer to all your jowl problems, well, they are not.
What facial massages are going to do are basically going to help move some lymphatic fluid that might be pulling in certain parts of your face where gravity pulls down.
So if you need temporary relief, give yourself a temporary massage. You might notice it looks slightly better for maybe an hour if you are lucky or two, but it is going to come back so do not fool yourself.
Disclaimer: In the name of full transparency, please note that this post contains affiliate links and any purchase made through such links will result in a small commission for us.
Jade Rollers & Gua Sha
In the same vein, jade rollers are the exact same thing as a facial massage but if you choose to spend money on a roller that is just rolling you could use a spoon instead. This is pretty much similar as is the gua sha. They all have similar sort of philosophies of massaging your muscles, relaxing your muscles, so they are not pulling as much, and getting some of that lymphatic fluid to move out of the way so that the fluid is not pulling and you look less swollen.
Microcurrent Devices: NuFace & ZIIP
If you have more cash to burn, you can go into microcurrent devices
like the NuFace or the ZIIP. If you use it you will see benefit from it, when you stop using it, you will not see any benefit from it. You only get the benefit from it as long as you use it is the point of these devices. It has microcurrents.
What Do Microcurrents Do?
They deliver low-level electrical currents to the muscles and to the tissues of the face, which can have several beneficial effects.
1) Muscle stimulation, so it’s going to help to get that muscle kind of contracted and moving which can help with lymphatic fluid, it’s not going to make your muscles bigger.
2) Supposedly it helps to promote with collagen production, helping to stimulate the ATP supply, the energy supply of your cells, promoting collagen to get secreted and for your skin to look slightly plumper over time. It improves circulation because your muscles are slightly getting stimulated and you are actually physically moving it kind of like with a roller, or a spoon, or a massage.
3) Reducing fluid retention or temporary lymphatic drainage is what you are going to probably see the most in the short term.
If you like things that you do yourself, or you want to do something every day, microcurrent devices.
In-Office Treatments
Going into the office is a different story because when it comes to jowls, it is not a problem caused by a single reason. Jowls are the result of your bone structure changing, your volume, your fat pads in your face shrinking and dropping around it and your skin elasticity getting laxer over time. So just putting filler, just doing a tightening treatment, or just doing a thread is not going to be is not going to be the end of all your problems.
It is a little bit of everything if you are trying to look natural and trying to look your best truly when you are trying to address jowls, you have to have a multifocal approach.
Buccal fat removal is one of the biggest things that I am against, especially in younger people. If you get rid of the fat from your cheeks, you are going to age much faster and your chin is going to drop much quicker as you get older.
If you are 50 55 plus, and you have a lot of weight on your cheeks, at that point maybe taking a little bit of fat out, or transferring it across your face, can make a big difference, but there is nothing preventative or proactive about taking out your buccal fat pads at a younger age.
If the Root Cause Issue is Volume
Where your volume is starting to shrink and drop, certain fillers can come into play and help. Never filling the area of the problem, working your way up to give you that optical illusion of a lift. Filler is a gelatinous substance. It can only hold so much. It is never going to lift your face. What you are looking for is a super skilled expert, who has an extremely precise eye, so that they can create the best optical illusion for your face and your proportions. It is very easy to inject and puff up, but it is not easy to do it seamlessly.
If the Root Cause Issue is Both Volume and Structural
Not all fillers are created equally. There are fillers that have higher thicker density, if your problem is not just volume but rather structural you can use these thicker and harder fillers, to recreate the contour of your jawline.
There are also stimulants, stimulants are not fillers. And I am talking about things that can help stimulate your own collagen and things that are called sculptura.
Sculptura is great if you are the type of person who is completely sinking, and losing volume in your face and as a result, you have so much laxity in your jawl area.
By giving back volume across the mid part of your face and out and your temples, it allows your face to be picked up because you now have that under padding.
If the Root Cause Issue is Laxity
We start to lose collagen in our mid-20s, and with stress, environment, and lifestyle, we’re losing collagen slightly faster. Doing procedures that help to contract the skin and tighten the skin without melting fat is going to be very helpful. These are the procedures with ultrasound energy or radiofrequency heat.
This is where going to somebody skilled is important. You want to make sure that you are not going deep to melt fat especially if you are somebody who lacks volume, because if you are going deep thinking you’re going to give a stronger treatment, and you don’t actually have the volume in place, you’re going to melt that fat, and your skin is going to become laxer and it’s going to be harder for it to contract. So less is more.
I suggest doing one of these treatments once every year and a half to two years. If you are doing anything with microneedling I am not a huge fan of constantly breaking your skin barriers so I suggest doing light treatments maybe once a year or twice a year if that is the path you’re going to take.
If you have a lot of fine lines, if you have a lot of textural changes on your skin you may want to go down the micro needling path, instead of the ulthera path, because you’re actually breaking the barriers that might help a little bit with the resurfacing.
Those are again up to the discretion of your provider expert, and that is why your face is not on sale.
Go for somebody whose aesthetic you trust because you want to age with that person.
Threads
Threads are dissolvable sutures that we can put in the face. I am not a huge fan of threads. I do not believe in doing threads at every single visit that a person comes into the office like twice or three times a year, absolutely not. Ultimately what are threads doing is, they allow your face to pull in certain vectors, picking up your skin which can help then to create a firmer type of collagen around the thread once the thread gets absorbed that firmer collagen is essentially scar tissue, and it allows your face to hold in certain vectors.
Threads going to give instant gratification, but do not be fooled, that instant gratification goes away after two weeks, and then it takes a few months to sort of do it’s magic. The reason I am not a huge fan of this constantly is because I don’t want to induce constant scar tissue in your face because in the off chance that you do want to get a facelift, it’s not going to be ideal. Now if you never want to get a facelift, you could do it more often than not. But you have to look at everybody’s face and everybody’s trajectory in life very specifically to what it is that they want to do for their face and their life. So this is an option on the table as well.
Facelift
Even with the most skilled plastic surgeons, they look good in the very very beginning, and then jowls are the first thing that comes back, always. They look good in the beginning because they’re tight, they’re swollen, and it takes time for them to settle, but after 6 months the first thing that kind of comes back is jowls.
Conclusion
The jowls are unfortunately here to stay.
The jowls are never going to fully go away.
It is important to understand what is happening with your face to know how to fully address it.
I hope you guys enjoyed this blog.
Disclaimer: In the name of full transparency, please note that this post contains affiliate links and any purchase made through such links will result in a small commission for us.
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