There are only two implant results I have ever seen on the internet that i would consider good. A handful i would consider adequate. The rest serve to either make you wonder what the patient payed for or even make them look worse, bloated and what not.
Ive been thinking about this, and while you should take my amateur opinion with a grain of salt, i have to conclude this:
it is not complicated technically to install jaw angle implants. I.e Its a prosthetic jaw angle that must be positioned over the real jaw angle. Theres not a whole lot of grey area.
So why then do jaw augmentation results frequently look s**t? Ruling out obvious cases of misalignment/poor placement, it seems obvious to me that the results must be down to A) the design of the implant and/or B) the material.
The latter aspect is what i want to discuss. Has anyone inspected/handled facial implants? I cannot shake my suspicion that a large reason for the lackluster results is because the most widely used material - silicone - is nothing at all like bone. Surgeons frequently seem to describe their preference for being able to "mold" and "shape" silicone in the room - this strikes me as odd. Imagine trying to shape or mold real bone, it wouldnt happen without some heavy tools, certainly heavier than a scalpel.
I suspect this is why the aesthetic outcome is frequently poor. The suggestion from surgeons like Eppley is that the "sharp jaw" look is not possible when the patient has fatty tissues, and I agree, but I highly doubt it is THAT rare to have a male patient, especially young ones, who are lean before the surgery. There is one example of this, but bizarrely, you have to dig through the annals of Eppley's blog to find it, and here are the results:
http://exploreplasticsurgery.com/case-study-9/to be quite fair to Eppley, it is a GOOD result. But if you notice, there is a lack of projection around the gonion/angle despite the pronounced flare on the 3d image design, which i suspect is because the silicone is being compressed or "squished" by the powerful masseter muscle. I suspect even a good implant design and operation is let down by the material properties of silicone. Something much closer to bone in density and hardness, like PEEK, would provide superior results i
assume.
There is only one surgery/surgeon i know of that explicitly uses PEEK for facial implants, and that is profilosurgical in Australia. If it is being used in the nanny worry wort bureaucratic nightmare state of Australia its is for damn sure being used elsewhere, but i am having no luck finding out.
