Plastic surgery numbers continue to grow year over year as technology advances, results become more natural looking, and pricing becomes a bit more affordable. The number of plastic surgery procedures available for patients is also growing. We’ve discovered different ways to perform the surgeries, which allow for less downtime and healing, as well as non-surgical procedures that can sometimes provide great results without having to go under the knife.

In general, women are more likely to seek out and undergo plastic surgery than men, but that doesn’t mean men aren’t looking for surgical options to enhance their appearance or help boost their self-esteem.

In 2019 92% of all cosmetic procedures were performed on women while only 8% were performed on men. This goes to show you just how many more women are having plastic surgery procedures when compared to men, but the number of men undergoing cosmetic procedures has been growing over the years.

Let’s take a look at just some of the plastic surgery procedures that men are having done as we move into the summer months.

Male Plastic Surgery

Even though the male and female body are different, it may surprise you to know that most males are seeking out plastic surgery that is very similar to what women are looking for. Men are focusing on their face and necks as well as recontouring of their body. This includes things like male breast reduction, liposuction and tummy tucks as well as brow and neck lifts as well as wrinkle reduction.

Brow Lift, Eyes, Face

The “zoom effect” has hit males just as much as it has hit females. Since everyone is sitting in front of their computers more often these days, and looking at themselves through their camera, they have noticed different imperfections that they don’t like in their face.

This has led to more men seeking out plastic surgery as well as non-surgical injectables to help rejuvenate their skin. This includes procedures like brow lifts, upper eye lifts and even liposuction around the cheeks and jawline.

There has also been an uptick in males receiving non-surgical injectables, like botox, to help smooth out their face and reduce wrinkles.

Neck Contouring

Going along with the facial surgery that males are undergoing, we’re also seeing a lot of males looking for neck contouring and rejuvenation. Sitting in front of that computer screen looking at yourself on video calls all the time has made people notice their jawlines and necks a lot more.

As you get older the skin in your neck begins to lose elasticity and starts to stretch out more than it did when you were younger. A lot of people feel that this is a trait that makes you look even older than you are, so a neck lift and/or neck contouring can help a great deal with this.

Tightening the skin in the neck can help give you a more pronounced jawline while also giving you a more youthful look. 

Skin Reduction/Tummy Tuck

With fitness and exercise becoming a huge part of a lot of people’s lives these days, more and more people are losing weight and getting into better shape. Losing weight can be an amazing feeling, but your body may not always look the way you want.

If you’ve lost a lot of weight then you might notice your skin hangs a little looser around your mid-section, which can be unsightly and embarrassing depending on how much skin is there. A lot of males these days are opting for skin reduction surgery to help eliminate this loose skin to help the appearance of their stomachs.

In addition to this, sometimes there’s just some stubborn fat that won’t disappear no matter how often you work out. In that case there are also tummy tucks available to help contour the mid-section to give you those abs you’ve always dreamed of.

Male Breast Reduction

And finally, while it may not seem like males are undergoing breast reduction surgery, you’d be surprised at how many of them are.

As you age your body begins to change and you may start to hold weight in different places than you did when you were younger. You may notice your breasts beginning to become a bit fattier than they once were.

Male breast reduction, or gynecomastia, is a great way to help reduce the amount of swelling in the breast area of males.

Plastic Surgery For Men

As plastic surgery becomes more accepted in society, and the results become more natural with updates in technology and procedures, more men are opting to have work done than ever before.

Plastic surgery is not just a female industry. If you are unhappy with something about your body, you deserve to look and feel good as well.

One of the best assets in our playbook, when it comes to plastic surgery, is the ability to show potential patients our book of before and after photos. These photos can give a patient a way to manage expectations as well as see the quality of work that we are presenting.

Unfortunately, while we love technology and its uses in the field of plastic surgery, it is now easier than ever for doctors or medical offices to manipulate those before and after photos to give the impression that their work is performing much better than is to be expected.

This is obviously a problem for a couple reasons. For one, it will set patient expectations to unreasonable levels which will only hurt you as a doctor when the patient is underwhelmed by the actual results. So, manipulating your before and after photos, or adding filters or camera tricks, to make them appear better will probably come back to haunt those doctors in the form of bad reviews or lack of referrals.

The other thing these manipulated photos are going to do is diminish your credibility. If your patient is smart enough to call you out on an altered after photo, then any trust you had gained with that patient is going to be immediately lost and you’re most likely going to lose a client before you even have one. And this can also cause you to lose possible referrals from this person in the future.

Therefore it’s extremely important that you ask your doctors questions, you look through their before and after photos and call out anything that you think may look suspicious, and you educate yourself on what to look for when it comes to photo manipulation.

In most cases manipulation of these before and after photos can be easily spotted if you know what you’re looking for.

What to Look for in Plastic Surgery Before and After Photos

Here are a few things to keep an eye out for when looking at plastic surgery before and after photos. These tips will help you to better identify if a photo has been manipulated or if they are trying to make the after photos look better than they would be in real life.

Lighting and Angles

One of the easiest tricks in photography is using lighting and angles, as well as lenses, to trick the viewers eye into seeing something in a way that isn’t exactly natural.

When looking at before and after photos you want to make sure that the images are as close to the same as possible. This means that the photos were taken with the same camera, from the same angle, and under the same lighting conditions.

There are many times where you’ll see a before photo that looks like it was shot with a 10-year-old cell phone camera, while the after photo was taken with professional lighting and a more professional stand-alone camera. Obviously the after picture is going to be cleaner, sharper, and brighter compared to the before photo, yet there was no computer manipulation done.

Now, not all plastic surgeons have access to the patients when trying to acquire after photos, so there may be some disparities between photos taken at the doctor’s office and ones taken by the patient at home, but in a lot of cases the after photos will be taken at the doctor’s office when the patients come in for follow-up appointments.

Lighting can also play a huge role in how photos look. With professional lighting directed at the patients face or body it can blow out any minor imperfections you may be able to see without professional lighting. It can help enhance features as well, which can make someone look totally different.

The angle in which the photo was taken will also play a role in how you perceive the before vs the after. Make sure the photos you are looking at are taken from as close to the original angle as possible. And, if you can, ask the doctor for multiple photos at different angles of the patient so you can compare.

When people think of photo manipulation a lot of people immediately jump to Photoshop, or some sort of computer program used to smooth out the skin or remove blemishes, but don’t forget that manipulation can happen outside of a computer as well.

Computer Manipulation and Filters

One of the biggest crazes these days is using filters to make yourself appear differently than in real life. Pretty much every photo app that you have on your phone has some way to smooth out skin and remove blemishes, so it’s important to know what to look for when looking at before and after photos.

Extremely smooth skin on the face and body with small little photo artifacts near the areas with more details, like the eyes and nose, are a sure sign that some sort of smoothing technique has been used.

Look for birthmarks, wrinkles, or other imperfections on the skin in the before pictures and try to match them up with the after photos. If you notice that a birthmark was very pronounced and sharp in the before picture, but doesn’t exist or is blurry in the after, then you can bet that some sort of filter or manipulation is going on.

Photo manipulation is just a part of our society these days, for better or worse, but the tactics that the media uses to make people look glamorous and flawless in magazines and online shouldn’t be used in the plastic surgeon’s office.

It’s almost like false advertising and it will eventually come back to hurt the surgeon that is manipulating their photos.

It’s important to find a reputable plastic surgeon that you can trust, and manipulating photos is a quick way to lose a person’s trust.

After looking through a surgeon’s book of before and after photos, ask if it would be possible to talk with a prior patient to get a firsthand take on what the surgeon is actually like. You can even seek out previous patients that may have left a review online and ask for their honest opinion.

Whatever you do, make sure that you look at multiple before and after photos, ask lots of questions, and try and verify as much information about the doctor as you can. Remember, most plastic surgery is permanent so you don’t want to have to undergo another procedure in order to fix an issue that a previous surgeon may have made.

If you have questions about plastic surgery, or would like to setup a consultation, please contact us today at Dr. Adams Plastic Surgery in Dallas, Texas. We’d be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding our procedures and/or Dr. Adams himself.

We pride ourselves on being upfront and truthful with all of our patients.

While plastic surgery has become more accepted in everyday life, there are still some people may have regrets about their decisions. It may be because they opted for plastic surgery early on in life and the changes to their body, as they age, have caused the surgical results to change. It could be because of other health issues that have arose since their surgery, or it could just be for overall personal reasons.

Whatever reason a person has for deciding to have their plastic surgery reversed is their own decision and should not be looked down upon. People change, priorities change, and as we age our bodies don’t hold up like they used to.

And while some plastic surgery procedures can be reversed, there are others that are more permanent. These procedures can’t necessarily be reversed, in the traditional sense, but may require additional surgery to try and return to a more natural look.

Reversing a Plastic Surgery Procedure

As we mentioned above, plastic surgery procedures are typically a more permanent solution rather than a temporary fix. Any time you undergo plastic surgery you are altering your body in a way that it wasn’t meant to be, naturally. That’s obviously not a bad thing, but it will make things harder to reverse if you decide you don’t like the results.

Injectables and Non-Surgical

If you’ve undergone non-surgical procedures or had injectables like Botox or dermal fillers, then you typically don’t have to worry about reversal if you don’t like the results.

These procedures are considered temporary, and the results usually begin to fade over time, in most cases, leaving you with your original look.

There can be instances where things were done incorrectly which can lead to trouble healing and possible issues in the future, but as long as you’re going to a credible doctor, these shouldn’t be issues.

Other non-surgical procedures like CoolSculpting, skin tightening, and resurfacing are also considered temporary in that they will not last forever. If you don’t continue to make regular appointments, then your body will slowly go back to how it was.

So if you’re worried about how you look after a non-surgical procedure or injectable procedure, keep in mind that these procedures are almost always temporary and will fade over time.

If you notice that you’re having pain or swelling for an extended period after these procedures, be sure to make an appointment with your doctor to make sure you’re not having a reaction, or something else is going on.

Surgical Procedures – Breast Augmentation, Tummy Tuck, and More

When it comes to more traditional plastic surgery procedures it’s a little more difficult to fully reverse them.

Surgical procedures are typically deemed as permanent as they are restructuring the muscles and tissues of the body to achieve the desired results. A surgeon can’t go back and re-add areas of the body that they may have removed, so depending on what type of procedure you want to have reversed it may not be possible.

There are, however, ways to revise a previous surgery to gain a more natural look or return to as close to the original form factor as possible. These methods do require more plastic surgery and the results may not always return you back to what you remembered pre-surgery.

For example, if you have breast augmentation surgery and enhance your breasts up to a larger size, and then realize years later that bigger isn’t always better, you can opt to have the original implants removed and replaced with a smaller size. However, the tissue and skin around your breasts will have changed over the course of time that you had the implants, so if you choose to have them fully removed, there will need to be additional surgery done in order to reshape the original tissue. This reshaping, especially after an extended period of time, doesn’t always bring your body back to what you knew pre-surgery, but in most cases, it will make you feel better about yourself.

Other plastic surgery procedures, like tummy tucks and liposuction cannot be revised in the same way as breast implants.

With breast implants you’re introducing an outside element to help enhance the breasts. So if you don’t like the outcome, you can always opt to have that element removed from your body.

With a tummy tuck or liposuction, you’re removing skin, fat, and underlying tissue from your body, and restructuring the remaining areas to fit the new look. And since you’ve removed things from your body, you can’t go in and add them back in.

Thankfully, with these types of procedures, most of the time people are very happy with the elements they had removed from their bodies and, unless there was a mistake made during the surgery, there are not many requests to re-add them back in.

Facelifts, eyebrow lifts, and other facial cosmetic surgical procedures are a little less forgiving. Just like the tummy tuck and liposuction, typically patients are having skin and/or fat removed and stretched to make their skin look tighter or their eyes look larger. So, in these cases it’s also very hard to reverse the procedures.

Facial surgery revisions are possible, but it’s extremely important to find a skilled surgeon. Your face is the first thing people see and the more you try to change things, the more obvious it’s going to be.

We’ve all seen the pictures and heard the horror stories about plastic surgeries gone wrong, and sometimes that comes from the people that continuously try to fix something that they deem wrong or unfavorable.

The best thing you can do regarding plastic surgery is to make sure you find a quality surgeon with a great reputation. This will help prevent mistakes from happening and they will be able to advise you on the long-term outcomes of these procedures.

Nobody can know how they might feel about themselves in the distant future but knowing that you are in good hands can make all the difference in the world.

If you have any questions regarding plastic surgery revision, or plastic surgery procedures in general, please setup a consultation with us at Dr. Adams Plastic Surgery and we’d be happy to help.