Rethinking Silicone, Part II
Silicone Lip Augmentation, Dallas, Texas
As many of you know, I perform tons of silicone injections for cosmetic purposes, including for lip augmentation, rhinoplasty correction, acne scarring correction, and minor touch ups for small facial deformities. I do not use it in bulk for facial volume but in small droplets built slowly over time. I know there is a fear as to how safe silicone is in the body.
In a previous blog, I talked about how massive studies have reviewed hundreds of thousands of women who have had silicone breast implants across multi-centers and multi-nations and shown through extensive meta-analysis that there is absolutely no causal link with silicone breast implants causing collagen vascular disease, etc. That is why in January 2007, silicone breast implants were placed back on the market. Now, of course, we are talking about cohesive models in which buckets of silicone do not spill out into the body. That is not even what I do for the face. If you want to review my first blog on silicone, click here.
I was in St. Louis a couple of weeks ago lecturing and I heard one lecturer say, “Did you know that you get silicone injected, breathed in and swallowed all the time?” Guess what, I knew that because I had heard that in the past but had forgotten about that pertinent information. What triggered me to write this blog is Emina, my hair-transplant coordinator, was saying to my hair-graft dissection team, “Don’t you like how these blades cut through the tissue because of the nice silicone coating?” And I thought, I better write a blog about how much silicone we actually ingest every day.
Did you know that every needle, knife blade, intravenous catheter is covered with silicone? Did you know medicines contain silicone? Did you know hundreds of medical devices contain silicone? Did you know the air around a copying machine contains silicone? Did you know perfumes contain silicone? Did you know that a diabetic gets approximately 2 to 3 cc of silicone per year injected directly into their bloodstream (from the repeated needle sticks)? That is oftentimes more than what I put into lips, and my droplets are not in the bloodstream but in the lips. Every time you get a needle stick or an iv catheter you get silicone. All of our pipes and water valves that carry our water are coated with silicone so when you drink water you get silicone ingested. Our hairsprays are filled with silicone so you breathe it in as well. Our food is covered with silicone. In fact, a study was performed in normal average human beings after they died and what was found is that every major organ had silicone in it, including our lymph glands and immune systems with no effect on us.
Remember that silicone has been used for cosmetic injections safely for over 40 years. The person I learned my technique from had been doing silicone for over 40 years. Now, obviously you see scary examples of bad silicone every day. I have to fix tons of silicone performed in a non-microdroplet fashion and done with both poor technical skill as well as a bad eye toward beauty and shape.
There are many competing permanent fillers on the market out there in the world with only one other one in the United States, Artefill. You can watch my video on why I do not use that product. I do not want to condemn it but want to say that nothing compares to silicone’s longstanding safety record as a bio-inert product THAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IN YOUR BODY.
Tomorrow we will be exploring the differences of the only two permanent fillers I use: silicone and fat.
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