Fat Injections Lipostructure

Carmen Laronn, MD

Fat Grafting for Contouring
These treatments refer to the correction of facial wrinkles by the infection of a variety of materials into the skin or underneath the skin to smooth out lines by plumping up the surface of the skin or by adding volume back to the areas that have lost it, thereby improving facial contours and fullness. Many different corrective materials may be used and their number increases every year.

Lipostructure can dramatically improve the wrinkles by adding fullness and volume. As you age and lose the fullness of youth, your face literally gets smaller. The skin remains the same size, but without the underlying padding, the skin retreats into wrinkles. Restoring the missing structure under the skin with Lipostructure is a form of fat grafting in which fat is used from one area of the body to build lasting structural changes in the face or other areas of the body. The special harvesting technique allows long term survival of the grafted fat.

Your body accepts the fat as an integral part of you, unlike silicon,or other non-living fillers or implants. With Lipostructure, the fat anchors to the surrounding tissues and becomes extremely stable. Fatty tissue is fragile and may be easily killed. Most other harvesting techniques damage the fat or place it so that it cannot establish an adequate blood supply, and therefore it cannot survive.

Lipostructure allows the fat to survive and it is much safer and easier on the patient compared to plastic surgery. Most cosmetic surgery involves use of sharp objects (knives and succors) under the skin. Damage to nerves, arteries, veins, and other vital structure is a real possibility. This risk has been minimized with Lipostructure by the development of a line of soft-edged, blunt instruments for placement of fat tissue. View more information below on Denver Fat Injections Lipostructure.

How It Works
Any area of the face or body may be treated; lips, laugh lines, cheeks, eyes, eyebrows, etc. This process replaces fat lost in the normal aging process with fat from elsewhere in your body. The procedure is usually done with light (conscious) sedation. It is important to select a physician with extensive experience in this procedure, as well as one qualified to provide different forms of anesthesia.

The donor site is most often the stomach, the buttocks, and the thighs. Once the fat is harvested it is centrifuged and processed to remove excess fluid and damaged cells so that mostly viable cells are used. Occasionally only one treatment may be necessary. It is more typical for 3 or 4 treatments to be needed over a 2/3-year interval. How long the treatment lasts is dependent on how your body exempts the graft, but most importantly on the skill of the physician and the technique used.

Recovery Time & Cost
If one treatment is chosen, the amount grafted at one time will be larger, and swelling and discomfort may last 1–2 weeks. When more gradual treatment is chosen (usually 3–4 placements), the down time is reduced to 3 days. You will need to get a ride home because you will be under the effects of anesthetic medication. Depending on the number of areas treated and the amount of fat needed to be transferred the cost may vary from $1600–$3800.

> Back to Procedures