4 Top Tips For Treating The Mid-Face

Treating the mid-face is the mainstay of many injectors’ soft tissue filler work. It is the cornerstone of facial rejuvenation and essential for aesthetics practitioners to understand fully.

Dr Tapan Patel is the Founder & Medical Director of the multi-award-winning PHI Clinic. He has over 20 years of experience in medical aesthetics and is the creator of eMASTR online training. He is a Global Key Opinion Leader for Allergan.

Here he shares his expertise with us, identifying four key considerations when treating the mid-face.

1 Remember we are healthcare professionals

You have to make a diagnosis. Step back and make a treatment plan, a strategy. Ask yourself, “what is the diagnosis? Why am I injecting this person? What am I trying to achieve?” Sometimes you will find you don’t end up treating quite what you thought you would initially. You decide to inject a different zone.

2 Make sure you are at the correct depth

The biggest differentiator between someone who consistently gets nice results and someone who looks at their treatment and thinks “that’s not what I wanted”, is depth. They are probably not at the depth they think they are.

The most common cause for that is a little bit of fear. Sometimes people treat by pinching the soft tissue before putting the needle through. If you do that, you’ve already increased the depth your needle has to traverse.

You will find that stretching the skin and removing some of the depth is much better when using the needle approach, especially in the anterior cheek.

For me, there is nothing worse than wanting to inject deep because you have been taught you need to, but ending up depositing that product more superficially. What then happens is it looks puffy, it looks swollen.

3 Don’t rush your injection

Injectors may be at the correct depth but if you rush your injection, if you inject too quickly, remember filler will take the path of least resistance and sometimes the path of least resistance is the needle track.

If you go vertically down but inject too quickly, rather than disseminating laterally (which is what you want the product to do) it can just go straight back up the needle path you’ve created and spreads in the superficial compartment.

We see this all the time. I see it when I’m watching people inject, it wasn’t intended but that is what happens.

4 Think carefully about quantities

You have to respect the patient in both the static but also the animated pose.

At the end of the treatment, the patient looks fine when they are not moving but then they start to smile, they laugh and you can see they have been over-treated.

You lose nothing by treating with a small amount of product, laying your foundation down and then bringing the patient back, reviewing, then adding some more.

For further dedicated study on treating the mid-face, take a look at our 1:1 training in Mid-Face & Cannula.

Article last fact-checked: 20 January 2023