You can schedule a consultation with Dr. Lungoci by accessing this link.
Dr. Roxana Lungoci, a specialist in plastic surgery, aesthetics and reconstructive microsurgery, knew from her 3rd year of college that she wanted to practice plastic surgery. She initially specialized in hand surgery and later in aesthetic surgery. She constantly reads and informs herself about the latest news in the field, and in medical procedures she is very attentive to details, an essential quality for the successful practice of this specialization.
First of all, we are talking about aesthetic surgery when we put our hands on the scalpel and we resort to it when injections are no longer useful, when hyaluronic acid, lipolysis enzymes or botulinum toxin no longer have a satisfactory effect for the patient.
Injections are performed to replace bone and fat resorption, phenomena that occur with age. We basically put back what the patient had without making her look obscene. Injections do not mean botox and that's it, and especially, botox is not put in the lips because that would mean paralyzing the Orbicularis Oris muscle and the patient would no longer be able to speak. Also, if you stop the injections, your face does not fall off, the hyaluronic acid remains in the place where it was injected for up to a year, and for life in a proportion of 30%, only 70% is resorbed by the body. As a result, because hyaluronic acid is not completely resorbed, the patient will look younger for a longer period even after a single injection.
And of course, the people we see with lips the size of a primate or the face of an icon in showbiz are some gross exaggerations, injected for free with poor quality products and not always by plastic surgeons or not by plastic surgeons who respect themselves.
It depends a lot on when we start using them, on the patient's genetics and on the lifestyle. Many people believe that we should postpone botulinum toxin or hyaluronic acid as long as possible, but it is a myth, our face does not fall, the injections actually delay the appearance of wrinkles.
A young lady who stretches her forehead and eye area with botox at the age of 27 will look different at 40 than a lady at 40 who has not had any injections. It is very important from when these procedures are started. In a way, someone who starts injecting hyaluronic acid at the age of 30, when facial bone resorption begins, will look good at 40, with volume in the cheekbones and barely visible nasolabial folds, because the bones that have been resorbed are replaced with hyaluronic acid that is injected into the bone, and in a different way, a lady who has done absolutely nothing to herself until she is 40 or so looks different with a sagging face and lots of wrinkles. In this case, much more needs to be injected for the person to achieve the desired result. And sometimes, for a person over 50 with a very sagging face, a quality-price ratio is made and sometimes a facelift operation is performed.
But, if there are people with a well-defined bone structure who want to avoid more than a facelift operation, then with the injection of 10 - 12 ml of hyaluronic acid, the volume of the face is restored, and the results are extraordinary, because we are talking about good quality hyaluronic acid, not hyaluronic acid that costs 10 euros per syringe, that is, ml.
In conclusion, genetics and the quality of substances used can help a person maintain themselves with injections until the age of 60. Surgery is done by people who between 40 and 60 years old come and want to remodel themselves and have not invested at all in facial aesthetics until then.
This happens because we have more negative examples than positive ones. People who constantly inject 4 -7 ml of hyaluronic acid per year are people who do not know that they have injected themselves and think that they look extraordinarily good due to their lifestyle. High-quality hyaluronic acid looks very natural, it integrates very well into our body, it is synthesized in such a way that it perfectly imitates the hyaluronic acid that our body secretes and the appearance is very natural. You'd have no way of noticing that the person is being injected. After a correctly performed injection, you can only feel something at the injection site for about a month, and after this period even the person injected will not know exactly where the procedure took place because they can no longer feel it at all. The product is completely integrated by the body. However, this could not happen with synthetic substances because our body is not made to integrate synthetic things.
As for health, injections are dangerous if they are done by doctors without the right to practice freely for injection, who do not know the anatomy and do not have the correct specialty.
12-14 months. After each injection there is a remanence of approximately 30% that remains for life, volume that remains there, perfectly integrated. So you can look younger even if you decided to inject yourself only once. After the first injection, patients come after a year, a year and a few months for a touch-up, the amount that was injected the first time will not be needed. Sometimes patients come after 3-4 years.
Aging is a normal physiological process, but it is true that the process is different from one person to another.
And among the internal factors, there are genetics: here everyone has their own luck. There is nothing we can do, but we can intervene in external factors, in lifestyle: the face of a person who hydrates, drinks a lot of water, eats a lot of fruit and vegetables, does not smoke, drinks coffee and moderate alcohol will look incomparably better than the face of a person who eats unhealthy, frequently consumes alcohol and smokes. Even the healing of these people after operations is more complicated: scars look worse, edema lasts longer, etc.
Also, skin laxity is a factor that influences decisions in aesthetic surgery. There are people who at 37-40 years old have exaggerated skin laxity, and in those people hyaluronic acid injections are pointless because the laxity can be adjusted only surgically.
The success of an aesthetic intervention is also given by the doctor's skill and the patient's postoperative compliance, or if we are talking about injections, the quality of the hyaluronic acid used.
There are patients who are not injected by plastic doctors and patients who are not injected with good quality hyaluronic acid and as a result we see exaggeratedly stretched skin, exploded, faces that look like plastic and subsequently with adverse reactions. A patient will never look plastic if he is injected with quality hyaluronic acid by a competent doctor.
It also matters if the doctor is a specialist in plastic surgery, he knows the anatomy of the face, operates on the face, he will have a certain type of approach to a procedure, different from the approach of another doctor from another specialty who has taken a course in injections (now they are in great vogue - everyone takes a course in injections and then injects hyaluronic acid). They will do it but never properly.
Many patients come and say that they have nasolabial wrinkles, that this bothers them the most and that is where they want to be injected. And then I explain to the patient that wrinkles appear from age and gravity pulling our face down, that our cheekbones no longer have the same fat and bone mass, and that if we want to get rid of the wrinkles between the nose and mouth, we need to inject our cheekbones and temples. Injecting the temples, cheekbones, malar area and jaws will contour the face beautifully. Then I show them photos so they understand my approach. If you inject only those grooves you add weight to an area that is already sagging, has no support, and will look ugly, as you sometimes see on TV. With injections, as with other pathologies, we treat the cause, not the effect.
The proportions are what God gave us and we must relate to them. Sometimes I have patients who have a very small nose and medium or small eyes and I will never be able to make them very big lips, because there will be no balance between the 3 floors of the face – that is, the upper floor with the forehead and eyes, the middle floor with the nose and cheeks and the lower floor with the mouth and jaw. Everything has to be in balance.
But there are also patients who have big eyes, a medium or slightly large nose and a small mouth. There you absolutely have to provide volume. But sometimes they are afraid to inject themselves because they have the impression that they will look vulgar. I understand their reaction because we have all seen very thick lips, which have nothing to do with aesthetics, but rather terrify you. I explain to these patients that the balance between the segments of the face radically changes the physiognomy for the better.
And, at the other extreme, I also have patients who request big lips where I do not consider it necessary and as a result I refuse such interventions. I have lost patients because of this, I have never agreed to do such injections.
Basically, the grotesque images we see on the street or on TV are either the result of injecting too much hyaluronic acid into the lips, or of injecting hyaluronic acid for cheekbones into the lips because hyaluronic acid has different concentrations for different segments of the face.
First of all, ask him what type of hyaluronic acid he uses. The only two companies that make quality hyaluronic acid are Juvederm and Restylane, at least from my point of view. But they are the most expensive, it is expensive to make an acid that closely resembles the hyaluronic acid synthesized by the body. But in my opinion, they are the only ones that should be injected. I only use these brands of acid to have very good aesthetic results, so that patients are satisfied, do not have complications after the injection, do not have lumps or nodules at the injection site and, last but not least, because it gives me the peace of mind necessary to practice my profession and not to have to touch up the complications that have arisen using a poor quality substance.
Secondly, they should ask the doctor if he is a plastic surgeon, and if not, what his specialty is. Those who are allowed to inject are plastic surgeons, dermatologists and doctors with the 0ro-maxillo-facial specialty. That's it. Dentists under no circumstances.
Thirdly, they should ask if the doctor who injects them gives them a notebook in which they will put their initials with the doctor's name, not the initials with the name of the clinic, because I have seen such cases. And the notebook must include the date, place and amount of the injection and stickers with the products that were injected must be attached. Each hyaluronic acid syringe comes with 4 stickers – one stays on the consultation sheet, one on the consent form, one on the patient’s notebook and one can be thrown away. And of course the container with the substance to be injected will have to be unsealed in front of the patient.
During an online consultation, I can make an initial assessment of the procedures that the patient should undergo. I can also provide medical advice for retouching those who have had cosmetic surgery and are not satisfied with the result and what the steps should be.
Basically, in an online consultation, I can do exactly what I do in a face-to-face session. I have many patients who prefer to discuss initially online and come to the office at a later stage, when they know exactly what to expect.
You can schedule a consultation with Dr. Lungoci by accessing this link.
