Achieving your ideal appearance is no longer impossible, thanks to plastic surgery. Today, all kinds of procedures can make your lips fuller, your eyes appear bigger, or your jawline more defined. The latter can be achieved with chin augmentation, which helps refine or improve the chin’s bone contour.

What Is Chin Augmentation?

Chin augmentation is a plastic surgery procedure to improve the chin’s size, shape, and projection. The surgery aims to restore your facial harmony, making the chin more prominent or defining it if it’s underdeveloped. It has at least three types of procedures – one involves fillers or fat grafts, the other chin implants, and the last, chin bone modification.
 

• Chin Augmentation Using Fillers

The most common chin augmentation procedure involves using fillers or fat grafts. They’re used to make the chin more defined and projected to enhance facial symmetry.
 

• Chin Implants

For this procedure, implants made of silicone or other materials are customized and incorporated into your existing bone anatomy. It’s a simple procedure if the chin correction needed is only mild.
 

• Chin Advancement by Osteotomy

If the correction is more significant, the procedure could be chin advancement by osteotomy. It’s a demanding procedure that involves modifying the chin bone.

Chin augmentation, specifically a chin implant, is often done with rhinoplasty or a nose job. It can also be done when you get a face or neck lift to have a better-defined jawline. All these procedures work together to help your face achieve overall harmony.

How Is Chin Augmentation Performed?

This procedure can be performed when you’re awake or asleep in the hospital, an outpatient clinic, or the surgeon’s office. Before the surgery, X-rays of your face and chin will be taken to find the part of your chin the surgeon needs to operate on. Depending on the type of augmentation you’re getting, you may go under general anesthesia.

Generally, chin augmentation involves a small incision below the chin or inside your mouth. The doctor places the implant inside a pocket in front of the chin bone and under the muscles. Your doctor attaches the implant using screws or stitches. If it’s chin advancement by osteotomy, the surgeon might move some of your bones.

Chin augmentation may take one to three hours. Meanwhile, the swelling of the chin area may take five to seven days to subside. In some cases, the surgeon combines the different procedures mentioned above to achieve the aesthetic outcome you desire.

Recovery 

You can expect to feel mild to moderate pain after the surgery. You’ll only have a liquid or soft diet for the first week until the swelling has improved considerably. If the surgeon used non-dissolvable sutures, you would have to get them removed at the clinic a week later. You can typically return to work one to two weeks after the procedure.

Chin augmentation is one of the best procedures to help achieve your desired defined jawline. If you want to know more about it, call Alan Matarasso MD, FACS, PC at 212-249-7500 or visit our office in New York, New York.