Wrinkles are not the end of the world; let’s get this one thing straight. Many people shy away from them, even though they’re just lines on your face. They’re completely natural and signify your experience and maturity.
It would be great for people to be absolutely confident in their appearance, but unfortunately, this is not the case for countless individuals. Thanks to advancements in medical and cosmetic technologies, we have different means to address various personal insecurities. Dermal fillers and PDO threads are both clinically proven to improve the appearance of deep lines and wrinkles.
They function in two completely different ways, and depending on what your practitioner decides is best for you, you may get one or another. But first, you need to understand what they are and what they can do.
Dermal Fillers
Wrinkles don’t just appear out of the blue sky; they require years and years of constant muscle movement, which degrades collagen along contraction lines. This is a universal process, and nobody’s immune to it.
The important thing to remember is that wrinkles are not the end of the world. They’re a lot easier to deal with nowadays than most people believe. With treatments like dermal filler injections, unwanted wrinkles have become a problem of the past.
Wrinkles go hand in hand with volume loss, another inevitable process that can be reversed with facial fillers. Volume loss is essentially a fat loss, and fat loss leads to dull skin, which has lost its support. Luckily, lost fat deposits can be replenished with hyaluronic acid-based sterile gels. Because hyaluronic fillers are hydrophilic, they expand in volume when injected into soft tissues and can grow 2 or 3 times at the original injection site. This increase in size and volume lifts the skin from the inside and improves the appearance of shallow and wrinkled areas.
This is the main reason why so many people choose dermal fillers. Their safety profile is also unmatched. Having gone through decades of constant improvements, dermal filler compounds are among the safest tools in the hands of clinicians. Thousands of patients worldwide get fillers injected safely daily with minimal unwanted side effects like filler migration or filler embolization.
Fillers are versatile, safe, and easy to work with. They cover an entire spectrum of treatments: from lip augmentations to nose jobs to jawline definition, but wrinkle-smoothing is one of their strongest suits.
PDO Thread Lift
As mentioned previously, sagging skin is secondary to laxity and loss of internal anchoring due to gravitational forces and general skin fatigue. But if there were a way to prop and tighten it back up, the wrinkles and age marks wouldn’t be as prominent. This is where you have treatments like PDO or polydioxanone thread lifts, which work approximately in the same manner as dermal fillers but with a different methodology.
Where dermal fillers lift up the skin by expanding the filler compound, PDO thread lifts use a special molded wire with tiny barbs, which attach underneath the skin and pull it tight. The skin gets suspended and fixed in its new state against the downward force of gravity.
It’s performed using a blunt or sharp cannula containing thread within its metal hollow walls. The cannula pierces the skin and is advanced to the desired place to be anchored. Once it reaches the other end, the thread is secured, and the cannula is pulled out. The thread is left under the skin, and the barbs securely attach to subcutaneous tissues keeping everything in place.
This minimally invasive treatment is very appealing to patients, much like the dermal fillers, since the only damage your skin experiences is the little puncture wound through which the cannula is inserted. This is really good news and means minimal downtime following the procedure with little to no bruising.
Besides minimal bruising, you should expect mild swelling to persist a few days after the procedure. You will have to avoid intense physical activity for a few weeks and avoid extreme facial expressions to let the threads settle in their final position. Moving around too much could cause problems in their positioning, and the results may not be optimal. You should avoid other invasive cosmetic treatments for the next few weeks and generally try to take it easy. There won’t be any problems returning to your everyday routine after the first day, but it would be optimal if you laid back just a little.
The cost of PDO thread lift is variable and depends on multiple factors, but on average, it costs $3000 to treat the lower and middle face.