Beauty starts with health
Aesthetic medicine offers a broad range of procedures for everyone who wants to improve their appearance. But before you start looking for the best aesthetic clinic near you, it’s important to understand that aesthetic procedures don’t work like magic – at least not on their own.
In reality, there are other important factors that play a key role in the success of any aesthetic treatment. These factors are your basic health, physical activity level, and diet.
Because of that, good aesthetic specialists will always offer an integrative approach to your treatment. They will not only select the most relevant cosmetic procedures for you, but also direct you to proper additional diagnostics, analyses, and sometimes, other medical professionals to identify and treat health issues that stand behind cosmetic complaints. They will also provide recommendations on your diet and relevant physical activities. This approach helps achieve the best possible result both for your appearance and health, while ensuring a long-term effect of aesthetic treatments.
What to expect from the integrative approach
One of the most common examples of integrative or interdisciplinary approach in aesthetic medicine is the cooperation with orthodontists and dentists.
Let’s take one of the most popular aesthetic procedures these days – lip augmentation. We all know about injections and fillers, but what we also have to understand is that the appearance of our lips is largely defined by our facial bone structure and teeth. Therefore, to achieve the best possible result for your lips, an experienced esthetician may sometimes recommend bite correction treatment or other dental procedures in addition to classic lip augmentation.
Another example is saggy skin in the chin-neck (cervicomental) angle. It can be easily (yet temporarily) fixed with various fillers, but in order to achieve permanent results, your aesthetic practitioner may direct you to additional diagnostics with other specialists. In certain situations, proper dental, orthodontic, and even osteopathic treatments can improve your jawline and overall facial structure, naturally lifting the skin in problematic areas. In this case, further cosmetic procedures will be based on the improved facial structure and thus, will provide even better results.
When talking about weight loss and body contouring programs, the interdisciplinary approach is extremely beneficial too. Before starting an aesthetic treatment, a good specialist may recommend you a consultation with a gastroenterologist, endocrinologist, dietitian, and other relevant professionals who will help you identify your hormone levels, allergies, eating habits, and other individual factors that affect your weight. After proper diagnostics are done and the treatment plan is developed, your aesthetic practitioner will make sure that all cosmetic procedures go in line with your health requirements and enhance the results of the general treatment and lifestyle changes.
Beauty is both individual and universal
Sometimes, we see a celebrity or model who has some distinctive feature we really like – let’s take lips as an example. We come to an aesthetic clinic with a picture and request to get “lips exactly like these” and expect to look as good as the original owner of such lips. This expectation can lead to a major disappointment because firstly, these new lips won’t look exactly the same on our face, and secondly, they can even do worse and make our face look unbalanced and unnatural.
For this reason, a good aesthetic specialist considers three important factors when planning a beauty procedure – your personal perception of beauty (e.g. people and features you consider beautiful), your natural features (e.g. ethnicity, heredity), and universal standards of beauty (e.g. proportions, symmetry, harmony).
In the end, your goal is to enhance your beauty, which cannot be achieved by just copying individual features of other people. A good esthetician will help you reach your beauty goals and feel your best by achieving healthy balance and harmony in your appearance.
Aesthetic medicine is not just for ladies
According to Dr. Larkina, 40% of all clients in LARKINA CENTER are men. With aging, men often start to complain about looking tired, they want to “refresh” their overall appearance and look their best at their age. The role of an aesthetic professional stays the same – besides making relevant cosmetic treatments, they also provide general lifestyle and health recommendations and, when needed, direct to other professionals if the case requires more thorough diagnostics.
Men sometimes worry that it will be obvious to people around that they had an aesthetic treatment, but in reality, it is a matter of the service quality. An experienced aesthetician will help you achieve a fresh appearance and look naturally great without any visible signs of “just coming from an aesthetic clinic”.
Aesthetic medicine is here to help you look younger and attractive at any age. And while there are many beauty trends come and go every year, it’s important to remember that the key to the best long-term results for your own appearance is to choose the right treatments based on your health, natural features, and other individual factors with the help of your aesthetic practitioner.
Dr. Svetlana Larkina is the chief physician of the LARKINA CENTER, a medical center of intensive cosmetology and anti-aging therapy in Ukraine. Svetlana is an MD, PhD, and certified trainer of 7 medical companies. She holds 8 patents and copyright certificates in the field of aesthetic medicine.
