UPDATE! We interviewed the Medical Director of Selphyl to answer our lingering questions about the Vampire Facelift. Give it a listen below, or read the full interview transcript on our Cosmetic Surgery Today Blog. Read more about Vampire Facelifts on our website.
To set the record straight, a vampire face lift—at least the kind of face lift that uses Selphyl injectable filler—does not make you look like a vampire. While plenty of teens would clamor for that type of treatment, the real reason that Selphyl has been dubbed the vampire face lift is far less haunting.
Selphyl injectable filler is a dermal filler system that uses the patient’s own blood as the filler. The patient has a few ounces of blood drawn and the dermatologist or surgeon mixes the patient’s blood with a proprietary substance. The substance separates the platelets and fibrin from the other substances in the blood like red blood cells. As you may know, platelets and fibrin are what help the blood to clot; however, when they are purified and injected back into the skin, they appear to stimulate the growth of new collagen. Collagen, the prototypical dermal filler, is what gives skin its fullness and suppleness.
What makes the Selphyl injectable filler approach so attractive to patients is that it takes something that is natural to the body and re-purposes it for use as a cosmetic treatment. There is no rejection by the body’s immune system because it is the patient’s own blood. Also the separation of platelets and fibrin takes about six minutes to complete and can be done right in the doctor’s office.
The vampire face lift is really no different than any other dermal filler treatment in terms of what it can be used to treat. Selphyl injectable filler can be used to treat nasolabial lines (from the corner of the nose to the corner of the mouth), glabellar lines (forehead crease between the eyebrows), as well as fine lines and wrinkles. Before it was being used as part of the “vampire face lift” for purely cosmetic reasons, the technology had been applied to the correction of post-operative scars and other wound repair treatments.
Since the treatment is fairly new, it is not clear how long the results of Selphyl injectable filler last compared to other dermal fillers. However Selphyl tends to be less expensive than other fillers, overall. Also, since there is not a large amount of foreign substance being injected into the skin, there is a very low chance of becoming allergic to the contents used in the injection.
People that are on anticoagulation or aspirin therapy may not be good candidates for the vampire face lift. Moreover, a patient must have a reasonable number of platelets in their blood in order for the filler to be effective. In other words, if you have thrombocytopenia (low blood platelets), the Selphyl injectable filler is probably not the right dermal filler for you.
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