I had a patient that had a chin implant (Dr Young is located in Bellevue Washington) placed by another physician near by.  The patient said to me that he felt his chin stuck out too much and that he had indents by his chin.  This was grafted with fat but the fat just couldn’t fill in all of the discrepancy.  We elected to look into his chin implant and replace it with an implant that has more lateral extension.  This was the thought after examining his chin.  When we went into the chin area the implant was indeed a “button” type of implant that just augmented the central part of the chin. This “button” type of chin implant is really rarely used for this reason.  I hardly ever put these in.  They accentuate the chin and make it look too big and also make the prejowl area deeper making the jowls look bigger.  Our answer was to put in a new implant that had more lateral extension and we choose the med por extended chin implant.  Here is a picture of the chin implant that we used:

The chin implant that he had look like this:

What might not be apparent in the picture right above is that the anatomical chin implant lacks the lateral projections for a more even transition to the jawline. The person’s implant that we did surgery however had even less lateral projection.  After removing the implant we tailored the extended chin implant because we thought it was too big and we then screwed in the implant to improve its “take” in this region.  Screwing the implant can decrease unwanted increase in size of the augmentation, prevent fluid accumulating deep to the implant that could cause infection, it also fixes the implant so that the implant doesn’t move.  Here is a video showing this patient’s implant and what we plan on putting in to replace their implant.

Thanks for reading, Dr Young

Dr Young specializes in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington