We do a magnificent job of making teeth look great and giving you a healthy and beautiful smile. Now that your teeth look good, what about the peri-oral areas around your mouth? If your teeth look good but we ignore the rest of your face, then we have really limited what we have done in aesthetic dentistry. It is time to seriously give serious consideration to extending the oral-systemic connection to the aesthetic realms and facial pain areas of the face which dentists are more familiar than any other healthcare practitioners.

Botox comes in the form of a purified protein. The mechanism of action for Botox is really quite simple. Botox is injected into the facial muscles but really doesn’t affect the muscle at all. Botox affects and blocks the transmitters between the motor nerves that innervate the muscle. There is no loss of sensory feeling in the muscles. Once the motor nerve endings are interrupted, the muscle cannot contract. When that muscle does not contract, the dynamic motion that causes wrinkles in the skin will in effect stop. The skin then starts to smooth out, and in approximately three to ten days after treatment, the skin above those muscles becomes nice and smooth. The effects of Botox last for approximately three to four months, at which time your re-treatment may be necessary.

Dermal fillers are commonly used to add volume to the face in the nasolabial folds, oral commissures, lips, and marionette lines. As we age, collagen is lost in these facial areas and these lines start to deepen. These dermal fillers are injected right under the skin into to plump up these areas so that these lines are much less noticeable. Dermal fillers are also used for lip augmentation and are used by dentists for high lip line cases, uneven lips, and to make the peri-oral area more aesthetic. The face looks more youthful and is the perfect complement to any aesthetic dentistry case that you do.