Chin Liposuction: Slim your face and eliminate a double chin

Chin liposuction is a one of my favorite plastic surgery procedures. I want to make people happy and this is one that consistently people are overjoyed about. I don't like my double chin when when we look down, nobody likes a double chin. Chin liposuction is a very, very small spot treatment of liposuction. 

We work right above the hyoid bone, which is right around the angle of the jaw, it goes from submental area to the neck, from the chin to around the hyoid or sometimes we call it the submental triangle. That tends to be an area that's stubborn when it comes to weight loss.

How Dr. Okada performs Chin Liposuction

The way I perform chin liposuction is very similar to other liposuctions. We start with a tumescence solution and we have to be careful about how much we put in. We also need to be very careful that we don't get it in areas we're not supposed to, strictly we stay underneath the skin. This is performed under anesthesia in an operating room and usually, the incision for submental liposuction is a tiny dot right in the front of your chin. I tried to hide it just underneath the chin so it's not visible from a social distance in any way. The incision is only three millimeters long, so it's about 1/8 of an inch. It's tiny. 

Once I infiltrate this area - from jawline to jawline in anterior, meaning in front of the hyoid bone on to the chin - that's the triangular area that I put in the tumescent solution. We wait about 15 minutes for the medicine to work. 

What I do differently, compared to other liposuction procedures is I hand liposuction this area. This means we have a short cannula about three millimeters wide, a much smaller, finer cannula than I would use compared to the rest of the body. Instead of attaching the suction device, I use a syringe and I hold the syringe back so it has suction and I hand liposuction this area. 

I did an Instagram post about chip liposuction so you can actually see what the suction looks like on that post. That patient, unfortunately, was not comfortable with their photo being on social media so I did not have a before and after photo. But if interested, someone can come into my office and see them (just not on social).  

Chin liposuction doesn't require a lot of fat removal, even 5 cc's of body tissue can make a significant difference, I would say about 5-20 CC's is typical of how much volume of fat I reduce in that area. The best part is the results are immediate and downtime is minimal.

Chin Liposuction Recovery

The recovery is just socially when you are comfortable. For the first week, I want my patients to be very diligent about wearing a compression garmant that does look a little bit like a Teletubby look, that wraps around the neck and over the head. Then after that, we can just switch to nighttime only. It's kind of hard to go into work if you're wearing a head wrap, so I usually request that patients take a week off. But if you're working from home, do not have to be on camera (via Zoom), and are just working from home on the phone, you should be able to get back to work within a couple of days. Downtime is very minimal.

Kybella vs Chin Liposuction

While we're on this subject, I do want to talk a little bit about Kybella. It's a medication that's made by Allergan, the same company that makes Botox. Kybella was FDA-approved in 2015 and is a medication that we inject in the area behind the chin that actually melts away fat. It does kill your fat cells. So it was FDA approved for the exact same reason why we do chin liposuction. That is an alternative procedure, however, it does have its limitations. 

It does require a minimum of two treatments, but most patients do require more than two. I typically say two to six treatments of Kybella is average. It does sting and we have to do lots of injection points,  spaced about a centimeter apart on the neck. 

The benefit of it is that it can be done in the office so a patient can go right back to work and it doesn't require going to the operating room. The negative of Kybella is it requires multiple treatments and the effects come slowly - so it's not an immediate, noticeable difference like neck liposuction. 

In the end, Kybella is often more expensive than neck liposuction as well, because we have to do multiple treatments and the medication itself is expensive. So a lot of patients will think that Kybella might be more affordable than neck liposuction, but oftentimes it is not.  

Kybella is good for a candidate who absolutely does not want to go to the operating room and would prefer an office procedure for the same reason. 

Good and Poor candidates for Chin Liposuction

Just like with any kind of liposuction, a good candidate for chin/neck liposuction is usually:

• A younger patient

• Wants to have a little bit more neck and jawline definition

• They have a noticeable fatty pocket underneath the chin that they don't like

• This fatty pocket is noticeable from the front as well as the side profile

A poor candidate for chin liposuction is someone who

• Has sagging skin

• You can see a band of tissue in the neck or in general we have facial tissue descent (drooping) 

Somebody with those characteristics is better suited with a facelift.

Chin Liposuction vs Masseter Botox

Continuing on the same vein as jawline rejuvenation. I will also talk a little bit about an off-label use of Botox. In the last year we're getting more and more requests about it, it's called masseter Botox. The masseter muscle is the primary muscle of mastication. That is a fancy way of saying that's the biggest muscle we use for chewing our food. 

The masseter muscle is about two inches wide. It starts near the top our cheekbone in front of her hairline and then extends all the way down by the angle where the jaw-line turns and bends and goes towards our ear. If you put your fingers on your jaw-line near your ears and clench your jaw, you can feel it moving.  

The kind of requests I get for masseter Botox is from women who would like a slimmer face. Botox makes the muscle not work so when the muscle is not getting the signal from the nerve, it shrinks and becomes smaller. A pleasant side effect of that muscle wasting away is we get a skinnier-looking face. That's another adjunct treatment we do to slim a jaw-line. The other use of masseter Botox is for patients who have a lot of jaw pain due to:

• chewing

• clenching their jaw

• grinding their teeth at night 

I do have to say using Botox for both jaw slimming as well as teeth grinding is am off label use, it is not FDA approved for that at this point. Botox is more FDA approved for the upper third of the face, certainly for the glabella (between the eyes) and for crow's feet, but not for jaw. That being said, it is very commonly used for this purpose. 

If you are considering masseter Botox, you really want to go to someone who knows their anatomy, knows that they won't inject the intra-arterial, the facial artery and vein, and they can do this safely. This Botox procedure usually requires around 50 units, 25 units on each side. It is a bigger dose of Botox compared to just doing the mid-forehead area. This lasts about four to six months or so. 

If you are interested in getting chin liposuction Columbus Ohio, contact Dr. Okada and schedule an in-person consultation.