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When you seek out plastic surgery, your goal is simple: to become a more beautiful, more confident version of yourself. But like any medical procedure, plastic surgery can go wrong — stories of ordinary people and even celebrities with “botched” surgeries proliferate online on a regular basis. What causes these issues, and how can you avoid them? Dr. Hani Sinno, a Montreal-based plastic surgeon, answers.
“We see patients that look like they’re overdone, or something is wrong,” he says. “This is something that we see in Hollywood, or with the actors, or even in the streets.” Why? Many people who pursue plastic surgery — and celebrities in particular — aren’t going to unlicensed or second-rate surgeons. Despite that fact, their results sometimes look almost comically unnatural.
Dr Sinno explains that in some cases, plastic surgery comes out looking irregular because a surgeon tries to “camouflage” an issue rather than target it directly.
“If someone has a very large nose for their face, we try not to patch the problem by giving them a chin augmentation with fillers and cheek augmentation to camouflage the nose to make it look smaller,” he says. “You might as well go ahead and do rhinoplasty, where someone’s going to be able to fix the problem and not just create a patchy solution.”
Rhinoplasty targets the issue more effectively, but in most cases, it also causes less trauma to the face. It’s a single procedure, but the “patchwork” fix requires the patient to undergo two procedures: chin augmentation and cheek augmentation.
However, these kinds of piecemeal fixes aren’t the only reason some plastic surgeries come out looking unnatural. Dr. Hani Sinno explains that In other cases, a patient pushes a surgeon to deliver almost impossible results — and the surgeon goes along with it.
That might be because the surgeon wants to give a patient what they want. They also might be focused on the payout for the surgery or even lack the knowledge to propose a more realistic solution.
Dr. Sinno emphasizes that in his practice, his primary focus is on helping the patients, even if it means suggesting another procedure or a change to the procedure they want. By the time the patient sees that the surgery isn’t what they’d hoped, they’ll be looking at undergoing revision surgeries to (hopefully) get more natural results.
Issues such as this can be avoided when a surgeon views each patient as an individual and focuses on delivering personalized results.
“We really have an ethical plastic surgery practice where we want to help our patients,” he says. “Whether they have a true physical deformity or even an emotional preoccupation with a physical abnormality or change in appearance they have, I want to be a source of hope, knowledge and excellence.”
So how should patients looking for a plastic surgeon go about making the right choice? Dr. Sinno’s advice is simple: “Go to someone who has the proper training, credentials, experience and above all knows aesthetics, knows anatomy and proportions, and is honest.”
