Is fat grafting not as effective as surgery or fillers?
Question: Fat grafting doesn’t seem as popular as other procedures. Is it not as effective as surgery or fillers?
Answer: Fat grafting is overall a very popular procedure but certainly not as popular as injectable fillers simply because of the fact that injectable fillers have, for the most part, absolutely no downtime and are extremely easy and overall cost effective since you simply grab a syringe of filler off the shelf and we can inject it into appropriate areas of the face to give an enhancement and improve the aesthetics in a very simple way. Fat transfer requires the harvesting of the fat, which involves liposuction of the belly or hips or knees and then we process the fat and then re-inject it using very small blunt-tipped cannulas. Multiple passes with the cannula are necessary to maximize the viability of the fat and, therefore, patients have much more swelling than when compared to an injectable filler. Surgery is going to be able to improve laxity and most often I am performing fat grafting in combination with other surgical procedures so that we can not only improve the laxity of the face but also volumize the face with the fat grafting. This combination treatment gives the best overall aesthetic results.
