Radiesse and the jawline: definition that builds rather than fills

Radiesse is a gel carrying tiny spheres of calcium hydroxylapatite, a mineral your bones are made of. Placed along the jawline, the gel gives immediate definition. Over the following weeks the body absorbs the gel and, around each sphere, lays down its own collagen. What remains is your tissue, firmer than before.

Why the jawline in particular

A jawline loses definition for two reasons that usually arrive together: the skin along it softens, and the small fat pad under the chin grows. Radiesse addresses the first by firming the skin and giving a clean line to work with. The second is a separate treatment, and the two are often planned together.

The two sizes

• The 1.5 ml syringe treats one area: the jawline alone, or the cheeks alone.
• The 3 ml treats the jawline together with the chin or the lower cheeks, where the structure is shared.

The result builds for around three months and holds for twelve to eighteen. A second treatment at around a year is the usual rhythm.

What the appointment involves

Numbing cream for twenty minutes, then the Radiesse is placed along the jawline with a blunt cannula rather than a needle, entering through one or two small points and laying the product in lines just above the bone. The cannula means fewer bruises and a smoother line. Forty-five minutes in all, and the definition is visible when you sit up, though the lasting result, the collagen your body builds around the product, takes about three months to arrive.

What Radiesse cannot do

It cannot lift a heavy lower face on its own, or remove a fat pad under the chin, or soften a masseter that has become square from clenching. Each of those has its own treatment, and the consultation is where the jawline is looked at as the sum of skin, fat and muscle rather than as a line to be drawn. Used for the right reason, Radiesse is one of the most natural-looking treatments there is; used for the wrong one, it disappoints.

Aftercare

• A cold compress on the first evening, and the head raised on the first night.
• No pressing or massaging the jaw for a week, unless the practitioner has asked you to.
• No dental work, or lying back in a dental chair, for two weeks.
• Arnica and paracetamol for any bruise or ache; not ibuprofen or aspirin.

How Radiesse fits with the rest of the face

A jawline is rarely treated on its own, because it sits between the cheeks above and the neck below, and a change in one shows in the others. Radiesse along the jaw with a little in the cheeks keeps the lower face in proportion; Profhilo for the neck keeps the skin below the line as firm as the line itself; fat dissolving beneath the chin, done first, gives the product a clean edge to hold. The consultation looks at the lower face as one shape, and plans the pieces in the order that makes each one count.

• Fat first, where there is a pad, over a few months.
• Radiesse a month after the last fat-dissolving session.
• Profhilo for the neck in the same season, and a review at four weeks.

Judged in profile photographs in the same light, the change is easy to see and hard to name, which is the result the clinic works towards: a jawline that was always there, found again.

Where a soft jawline comes with fullness under the chin, a short course of fat-dissolving injections first makes the Radiesse result cleaner. The consultation looks at both.