“I hate my turkey neck!” “My double chin looks terrible in selfies!”
Both are common complaints I hear from women and men who come to our practice. During our consultations, they look in the mirror, drop their head or pull it back against the muscles in their neck. Some grab their chin skin, wiggle it and exclaim just how loose it is.
I have news for them all. Most visual tracking studies confirm that no one is looking at your neck. Neuropsychologists have known this for a long time, and now advertisers are onto it, too. By nature, humans are actually drawn to the eyes, lips and facial shape…not the neck. This heat map proves the point. The yellow on the image on the right shows you where people are focusing-on the models mid face and eyes.
But, all admonitions aside, what can be done to tighten the neck? It is a fact that most people would prefer to avoid a face or neck lift, though this is often the best way to improve the appearance of the neck. A neck lift is an outpatient procedure and can be done with relatively little down time. Sometimes, all that is required is liposuction of the neck, also an in-office procedure.
At W Cosmetic Surgery, we are very enthusiastic about ThermiTight™, an in office procedure we’ve been offering since early 2014, that tightens skin and removes fat. It appears to help alter the contours of the neck. Improvement is immediate and even improves over time. Here’s a photo of one of our patients.
She can also be seen on our YouTube channel documenting her healing over the first six months, or you can see her case study.
We are also getting a great deal of questions about the chin “shot” that’s been making news. The formal name is Kybella™, and was recently approved for use here in the U.S. It involves multiple injections of deoxycholic acid—a substance similar to the one used to dissolve gall bladder stones. Treatment with Kybella is done in a series of office visits. It is a relatively expensive product that does produce changes in the neck. It would be worthwhile in someone with fullness in the neck. However, it does little for the jowls—can’t be used around them because it has caused paralysis and poor function of the facial muscles in the neck—and doesn’t tighten skin.
We feel that we can generate the same changes, with ThermiTight. The procedure involves the insertion of a slightly larger needle than Kybella, the RF wand. It produces results in one treatment with about the same amount of down time and at lower cost. And since Kybella cannot be used close to the jaw, it likely cannot replicate the results we’re seeing with Thermi. So, in my opinion, you see more changes at less cost—meaning Thermi hits a home run (or at least a double) as a facelift bypass.
