Fat Grafting

Dr. Richard Hamilton performs fat grafting at his practice in Adelaide, Australia.

Dr. Hamilton: "Fat grafting means taking fat from a part of the body that can spare fat and putting it in other parts of the body. I’m using it principally in facial rejuvenation. There are some patients who are not quite ready for a facelift. Or they just lack volume in their face. I can harvest micro fat droplets from their abdomen and put it into their face in different areas. I can put it into their cheeks, I can put it under their eyebrows, I can put it into their lips, I can put it in some of the deeper creases, and I can just put it under the skin, and this rejuvenates the face in a most remarkable way, and it can actually save patients from having a formal facelift operation for many years. The operation takes two to three hours to do because there’s a lot in it, but it’s just delicate work, and we’ve just got to take our time to harvest the fat, and prepare it in a special way, and put it in syringes before we inject it. So it takes two to three hours. Patients are in recovery for 20 minutes, and home they go. The do experience quite a lot of swelling and bruising after the procedure, and it settles in about three to four weeks. I also use fat grafting in conjunction with a face lift itself. Some patients need a face lift, but they haven’t got enough volume in their own face tissue to get the right aesthetic results. So I do the same thing, I harvest fat from the abdomen, and I put it into those different areas, particularly the cheeks and the lips and the brows, and the temples; we do sometimes get hollowing in the temples. And that’s a great extra added bonus to the face lift procedure."