Recently i was asked if i’m a ‘landmark’ type of injector or an ‘artistic’ one… and it made me think, and realised that I’m actually both.
I use landmarks on the face because they are really really important for safety. You need to know the approximate positions of the facial arteries and blood vessels, nerves, ligaments, muscles etc. (You can’t know the exact locations of some of these things without guided ultrasound). I use landmarks because they help with understanding the ageing face – for example the fat pads in the face that make up your face shape. These are really important when putting fillers in the face – you need to understand the structure of the fat pads and the ligaments that they surround in order to understand where to place filler in order to replace lost voume appropriately, to support those underlying ligaments, and to create a natural looking result.
You need to know how to judge where the facial arteries are so you can avoid them when applying filler – if you inject too close to or into a blood vessel you can cause a vascular occlusion (or VO),with potentially catastrophic results, or if you ‘nick’ one with a needle you are likely to seriously bruise someone. But not everyone has the facial anatomy that you expect – i was chatting to the very brilliant Dr Raj Thethi of the Yorkshire Skin Clinic (randomly at the 2023 Leeds Accountancy awards!) who was telling me about when he got his guided ultrasound, and realised the woman he was about to inject had, instead of one each side, no facial artery on one side and three branches on the other side! So we never really know – but we need to be informed and have a good understanding.
You need to understand the basic structure of the face, and what makes a face ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ – i often get women who feel their structure is too masculine and want to be made to look ‘softer’, and men who feel they need ‘squaring off’ a bit! or as they age, they lose the rugged feel to their jaw! I also treat transgender clients – to either feminise or masculinise the face as required. Added to this you need to understand how the face ages in structural terms, and how to correct this with dermal filler.
So in some respects i am a landmark injector, but in many ways i am not. There are guides to the ‘perfect face’ which have been developed by looking at those who are considered the most beautiful, and putting together rules – but different people find different things attractive. The Ricketts line, for example, is an imaginary line drawn from the tip of the nose to the prominence of the chin and the ‘perfect’ standard is that the tip of the nose, the outermost point of each lip and the chin fall in a perfectly straight line. I can assure you most people do not hit this line…
I look at the face first. I appreciate that all faces are completely different, the needs and wants of the client is different. They have aged differently and all have their own story to tell. I dont want to fundamentally change a persons looks – i want to maximise their natural beauty, but make them look amazing for their age! My fillers are in no way formulaic. There is no one-size-fits-all treatment regime. I don’t want my clients to all look the same – there is no formula for beauty, everyone has their own shape, smile, quirks – when someone tries to look like someone else (when I get given a picture of a kardashians lips, for example!) is when it often goes wrong. Your face does not look like hers and never will – and trying to make it look like that will inevitably spell disaster. My job is artistic and I am humbled to be able to create. There are always going to be ‘trends’ – Russian lips, the ‘chipmunk cheek’ phase, hugely high cheek bones, and a whole raft of other things that don’t generally sit as ‘natural’ and are generally a passing phase (butt lift anyone?! I can honestly say I don’t know of any single person ever as I was growing up who asked to have a bigger butt….). Trends always seem to end up becoming extremes, and then expiring..
Your face doesn’t need to be ‘trendy’ and it isn’t a mathematics equation – it is soft, natural, subtly ageing and beautiful in its own right. You are you, not anyone else, and what suits someone else may not suit you. Make sure the person treating you really looks at YOU, and does what is right for your face, not what they think is the right thing for a standardised model of ‘beauty’. You are beautiful already.
