Dr. Gardner on Fat Grafting

Hi. Dr. Gardner here to address something that we get a lot of questions about, which is fat grafting. It’s become very popular in the last few years and we do a lot of it here.

Dr. Baccara is actively injecting fat into the breast to enhance cleavage during his breast augmentations. He also uses it to help smooth out some irregularities in his breast reconstructions, and almost all my face lifts and neck lifts now get fat grafts. We also have a lot of patients who come in and they use fillers like Juvederm and Voluma and ask, “well, can fat replace those?” and the answer is yes. In fact we often do fat grafts right in the office under local anesthesia.

So I’d like to talk about what fat grafting is and where we do it and the options for you as a potential patient. Fat grafting is exactly like it sounds, it’s taking fat from one part of the body and injecting it into another. When you do that, it relies on the body accepting that graft of fat and the way it does that is it grows blood vessels into it so it actually becomes part of you. It’s not just an injection of a filler that gets absorbed over time, the fat actually becomes a living tissue just like the rest of your fat and it becomes part of you. The nice thing about that is it can last a long, long time, whereas other fillers can last anywhere from six months to a year and a half. The other nice thing about using your own fat is you can take a lot of it. Fillers are expensive; one cc of a filler can cost a lot of money, we can take up to 30 cc’s of fat and inject it into the face, so for the amount of fat that can be injected at one time, it really is a good value.

What are the places we like to inject fat? Some of the most popular places we inject is in the cheekbones (to offer fullness where it’s hollowing out it also provides a little bit of a lift on these tissues down there as they start to sag), these deep folds right here called the nasolabial folds (we’ll put fat into those to help flatten those out. Very good use of it is in these folds here called the marionette lines. We can get those to soften up we can actually push up the corners of the mouth and it works very well there), another area that we use it is in the chin (the chin starts getting wrinkled and shriveled up as we age. We can put fat in there and it rejuvenates it makes it look a little fuller), another very popular area for fat is in the temples (as we age, we tend to get what’s called temporal hollowing and we can put fat in there to fill the temples back out). So for the face, fat’s a great option cost effective can be done in the office often done in combination with other facial procedures and it can last a long time. Thank you.