Stephanie Edwards

What Actually Works on a Sagging Jawline?

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They painted the corridor outside our office at the end of June, and to do it they had to take down the company photographs. There is one for every year. Whole department, three rows, out on the front steps, taken by the same person with the same camera in roughly the same light every September. The painters took the last five off the wall and leaned them against the opposite side of the corridor while they worked, in order, oldest on the left. I went past them at about twelve thirty on my way to get a sandwich. I have walked past those photographs every working day for five years. I have never once looked at them, in the way that you never look at anything that is always there. Five of them in a row on the floor is a different object entirely. In the first four I am the same. Same face, four years running, second row, third from the left. You could swap those four heads around and nobody would be able to tell you which year was which. Then there is the fifth one. I lost sixty eight pounds between the fourth photograph and the fifth photograph. It took fourteen months, a doctor kept an eye on it the whole way, and there was more walking in that stretch than in the rest of my adult life put together. Given the choice again tomorrow, I would take it. I am much smaller in the fifth photograph. That is the first thing anybody would see. The second thing, if they looked, is that my jawline is gone. In photograph four there is a clear line where my face ends. In photograph five there is no line at all. Cheek into jaw, jaw into neck, one continuous soft slope with nothing marking where anything stops. There are jowls on both sides that are not in any of the other four. My neck is loose across the front. My cheeks have gone in under the bone, and so have my temples, so the top half of my face has a shadow in it that is not there in any earlier year. My marionette lines and my nasolabial folds arrived in that same fourteen months. They are creases in photograph five and they are nothing at all in photograph four. I stood in that corridor for a while, and a girl from accounting came past and said, God, I hate mine, and kept walking. Not one person in that building said anything about my face. Not that day and not in the fourteen months. Everybody said something about the weight. Everybody. There is not a single person on that floor who has not said something kind and genuine to me about the weight. And on the other thing, silence, from every single one of them, and the silence is much louder than any of it. Here is what is actually going on underneath, and it took me about ten months to work it out. Fat is not only fat when it is in your face. It is what your skin is resting on. Mine had been under there since my twenties and I had never once thought of it as doing a job. It was doing a job. You cannot take sixty eight pounds off a body and instruct it to leave your face out of it. It comes off wherever it feels like coming off. So the fat under my cheeks and behind my temples went, and the skin that had been lying over the top of it for twenty five years did not shrink down to match, because skin does not do that. It stayed the size it had been stretched to. Which leaves you carrying more covering than you have anything left to cover. None of that is my face getting old quicker than my knees. It is my face getting empty, and every single thing I read off that fifth photograph is what empty looks like from the front. And then there is the thing you are not allowed to say, which I have now said to exactly two people. In a photograph I read older sixty eight pounds down than I did sixty eight pounds up. Everything below my neck is the best decision of my adult life and I will argue that with anybody. But there is not one woman who has done this who does not know the face part, and hardly any of us will say so, because out loud it sounds like ingratitude about the one thing we got right. So I finally asked a professional to put an actual figure on the thing everyone mentions first. Filler works. I have never once doubted that part. A friend from my old book club had hers done two summers ago, and if she had not told me herself I would never have known. Four thousand dollars, in a consultation room, on a Thursday. I did not sit down and do the math on it. What finished it was saying the figure out loud to my sister on the phone that night, because what came out of my mouth was that it would be four thousand to start. It fades and you rebook. That is a standing order, not a purchase. I already have one of those leaving my account every month for the thing that got me this far, and I was not going to open a second. So I did what everybody does and I bought jars. A firming serum with a dropper on it. A neck cream that cost more than the coat I wear over the top of it. A StriVectin serum, on a recommendation from somebody at work. Collagen powder stirred into my coffee every morning from February. All of it stops at the top. The skin barrier blocks it, so it cannot penetrate deep enough to reach where our collagen is produced, and that was always the only address that mattered. So none of it did anything. What I was short of was not a better jar. It was a way in. Micro Infusion is the name of the treatment that does that. It uses sterile, super-fine, 24k gold-plated microneedles to open a temporary way past the barrier. It delivers a powerful peptide serum packed with bioactive collagen peptides and hyaluronic acid deep into the skin and actually reaches where the collagen is lost. This process boosts your collagen production and transforms the look of your face from the inside out. Visibly diminishing the wrinkles and lines around your mouth, your nasolabial folds and your marionette lines. While visibly tightening and lifting the sagging around your jowls and your neck. One thing I want to answer rather than dodge, because it was my own first objection. It does not put fat back. Nothing puts fat back except fat, and anybody telling you different is selling you something. What it works on is the other half of what holds a face up, the collagen and the structure underneath, and that half turned out to be the half I could actually do something about. A clinic wants five to seven hundred dollars a session for it, and doing that math next to the four thousand I had already been quoted almost talked me out of the whole idea. Essentially, this US skincare company has made the same technology available at home at just a fraction of the cost with their Micro Infusion System. Night one there was a glow on my face and the skin itself read visibly plumper to me. From one go, on an ordinary Tuesday, having expected nothing. At about six weeks the top half of my face was where I saw it. The hollow under each cheekbone read visibly less deep to me, and so did the flat patch at each temple. Then my mouth wrinkles. Those, and the vertical lines on my lips, were visibly softer to me than they had been. Across my forehead, the same. And at my eyes, where the fine lines sit, which is an area I had never once given a thought to. Softer. Not gone. I have put those two words in that order on purpose. At about twelve weeks it reached the part I had given up on completely. My jawline read visibly firmer to me, my jowls read visibly tighter, and my neck looks visibly lifted. Firm, smooth, glow still sitting on it. There is an edge along my jaw in the mirror again. Not the one in photograph four, and I am not going to claim otherwise, but an edge where for two years there was a slope. Then it went past just me. The girl from accounting, the one who said she hated hers, stopped me by the elevator and asked me what I had changed. Someone in finance who has said maybe ten words to me in five years told me I looked well. Not one person guessed my age. Nobody mentioned the weight either, which after fourteen months of it being the only subject on offer was its own strange quiet. One woman's face, about twelve weeks. Another woman's will do whatever it does on its own timing. They put the photographs back up in the second week of July. Five of them, same order, same wall. For two weeks before that there were five rectangles of clean unfaded paint in a row up there where they had been, and every single person who came down that corridor stopped and looked at them. If you are a woman in her forties or fifties who won the weight and lost the jawline in the same fourteen months, the jars were never able to get to it. And a clinic with a needle in it is not your only remaining option. 👉 https://go.dermareviewsonline.com/229b9a2b-b4bc-45a8-a69f-8303f2dd0663