By Mimi Greenwood Knight
Cosmetic surgery won’t turn you into someone else and won’t solve your personal or relationship problems, but it sure can bolster your self-confidence and add to your overall wellbeing. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons lists the following as some common ways women in the United States are doing just that.
Facelift
Facelifts are a great way to repair sagging, loose, droopy, or wrinkled skin on the lower face and turn back the clock. During this procedure, facial tissues are lifted, excess skin removed, and skin replaced over repositioned contours. Facelifts are often performed with neck, forehead, or eyelid surgery and range from mini lifts to extended deep plane facelifts.
Liposuction
This is not intended as a weight-loss technique but as a way to improve the body’s shape by strategically removing localized fat deposits using a vacuum-suction technique. Liposuction can be performed on most parts of your body to reduce fat, often more than one at a time, and can also be used to remove fat tumors (lipomas) and address male gynecomastia.
Tummy Tuck
Also known as abdominoplasty, a tummy tuck can improve the shape of your abdomen and your abdominal profile, removing excess fat and loose, sagging skin and restoring weakened or separated muscles. While it’s not a replacement for exercise and eating right and can’t eliminate stretch marks aside from those in the excess skin that’s removed, if you maintain your weight, tummy tuck results can be dramatic and permanent.
Breast Augmentation
This procedure is an ideal way for many women to increase the size or change the shape of their breasts with implants or their own fat. Breast augmentation isn’t the same as a breast lift or reduction, although it’s not uncommon for augmentations and lifts or reductions to be performed together.
Hair Transplantation
Both men and women can suffer from hair loss. Fortunately, hair transplantation surgery can improve the appearance of baldness. Different techniques are used to transplant hair, including follicular unit extraction (FUE) and the strip method. Ask your provider to explain the differences to decide which procedure suits you.
Rhinoplasty
Also known as a “nose job,” this refers to any surgery that repairs or reshapes the nose. It may be performed for cosmetic or medical reasons, used to reduce the nose size, correct problems following an injury, address congenital disorders, relieve, or improve breathing problems, narrow the shape of the nostrils, or change the shape or angle of the nose.
DID YOU KNOW?
- Surgery for correcting facial injuries is believed to date back more than 4,000 years.
- In India, physicians employed skin grafts in reconstructive surgery as early as 800 B.C.
- During the Greco-Roman period, medical writer Aulus Cornelius Celsus detailed surgical methods for reconstructing ears, lips, and noses.
- Early Byzantine writing chronicled reconstructive techniques for repairing facial defects.
