Who is the Perfect Sculptra® Candidate, Fall 2014 Newsletter

Sculptra® is filler that stimulates a person’s skin to make new collagen after it is injected. Unlike the standard fillers which are gel-like substance that fill or plump up the skin to reduce wrinkles, or create lift or volume, Sculptra® is a material that is dissolved in sterile water and injected only to be metabolized by the body. During the time it is there, however, it causes the cells that make collagen to make more. This is extremely advantageous when someone has significant volume loss.

What is significant volume loss? If you are too thin in your face it starts looking gaunt, less full, and tired. Even people who aren’t thin can sometimes need Sculptra®. The issue is that hyaluronic acid fillers (like JUVÉDERM®, JUVÉDERM VOLUMA^™ XC and Restylane®) can be costly for a very small amount. You need 15 syringes to come up with only 1 tablespoon of filler! So when we need more than what is reasonable, we use Sculptra®. Sculptra® is great at building new tissue where there was very little. In addition, once we start to reach our fifties we do start to lose quite a bit of volume in areas that aren’t easy to fill, like the temples and the areas where the cheek meets the ears. You might think this isn’t important, until you see what the before and after pictures accomplish. We, in the cosmetic community, have truly discovered in the last 10 years that losing the fat, muscle and bone in your face is THE NUMBER ONE THING that causes the appearance of aging. WE get wrinkles because we lose the inflation of our face and the skin implodes, like a balloon without air.

I like the combination of Sculptra® with hyaluronic acid fillers because the Sculptra® can give a nice background of increased volume and then we can augment the areas that need special interest (like the cheeks, the hollows under the eyes and the wrinkles around the mouth) with HA filler. It usually isn’t one versus the other, but a combination of fillers that give the best results.