Before surgery <things I took for a month to reduce swelling><Now at 6 months!> Surgical areas: 3 types of contouring, nose tip correction with ear cartilage (no implant), endotine forehead lift
Hello! I had contouring surgery in March this spring, so it’s already been half a year! ㅎㅎㅎㅎ Before surgery I spent so much time just doing research, and after surgery I was almost coming here every day to share information and stay active. The day after surgery I was looking up swelling... wondering if I was the only one swelling this much, when the swelling would start going down noticeably, comparing myself with others, haha. This may be a bit long, but I really want to share everything I felt. Contouring surgery is truly a major surgery...
The reason I decided to have surgery was that the face shape that hadn’t stood out much in my early 20s started becoming more pronounced in my mid-20s whenever I lost weight: my cheekbones stuck out, and my jaw was angular too, so I gradually felt like I was becoming more masculine? skeletal-looking, and it was honestly incredibly stressful. I started avoiding caps, beanies, and headbands... I absolutely never wore a messy bun.. For a very long time I had only thought about it and said I wanted to do it, but as soon as I turned 30 I decided, and then I was able to have the surgery the following year :) I needed time to save money too. I wanted to be able to rest properly for a month after surgery.
My criteria for choosing the hospital where I decided to have surgery were: not a large hospital X (because it seemed like there was a list of ghost surgeries), not a hospital advertising on multiple cosmetic apps/blogs/cafes X, not a hospital offering an even cheaper event price X. Honestly, even if it was a bit more expensive, I wanted to avoid large hospitals with event-price discounts that cut the price down too much. I didn’t want to choose an event price for a surgery that involves the facial bones and end up being just one of the many patients crowded into that cheap price. Of course, after consulting at several hospitals, you’ll naturally find one where, after talking with the doctor, you think, ah, I should do it here. You’ll get that feeling. The hospital I chose after carefully comparing options was (Sinnonhyeon ㅌㅋ), and even the aftercare was excellent. Among reviews from other hospitals, there were ones saying you never see the doctor after surgery, and that it was treated as normal for nurses to remove stitches. So from the consultation all the way to later aftercare, even the stitch removal being done by the doctor was moving...
I’ve always been told that my face is small, so when I tried talking about my complex with people around me, or when cosmetic surgery came up, nobody really sympathized... I didn’t want to reduce the size of my face.. I just wanted to soften the angles, but people would say things like, why even do that? Still, no matter how much people around me told me not to do it, my complex didn’t go away. I did it purely for my own satisfaction! Now, 6 months later, I’m truly so happy. Since my complex is gone, I can wear my hair any way I want, and every kind of hat suits me well. I also love that my face looks even smaller. ㅠㅠ!!!
I wanted a natural line, so I wanted them to shave while keeping the angles of both square jaws a little. During the consultation, the doctor showed me a rough Photoshop preview of the post-surgery look and said, “Do you want this much? If we shave a bit more, it’ll look like this” lol. Right now, after surgery, it turned out much prettier than the Photoshop preview they made for me ♡
The sagging cheeks that people worry about after contouring surgery, I worried about that too, but so far there doesn’t seem to be any obvious sagging. The swelling hasn’t fully gone down, so I think I’ll need to wait until a full year has passed to see. I’m also thinking of taking care of it later with lifting such as Ulthera. It seems like a lot of people do this kind of care even without contouring surgery, so it doesn’t really bother me.
From the consultation to the pre-op tests and even lying down on the operating table, everything happened so fast. I thought I wouldn’t be able to wash my hair for several days, so I washed it really thoroughly early in the morning and went to the hospital for surgery, but after surgery my hair was completely matted... ㅈ...ㅋㅋㅋㅋ I held out for 5 days, then went to a salon to wash my hair, and it turned into a scrub-brush head that took a long time to untangle...
Thinking back to right after surgery still makes me dizzy. ㅠㅠ To be honest, after reading many reviews saying contouring surgery hurts less than expected and that bones can’t feel pain, I was really careless, but when I woke up after surgery I was completely shocked because it hurt sooooo much!! It hurt so much that I was just saying ouch, ouch, ouch without meaning to, and during the first few hours I seriously regretted the surgeryㅜㅜ Thanks to the nurses’ amazing care (they replaced the ice packs before they melted and gave me pain injections), I barely got through the night. The doctor also stayed until late at night and came back early the next morning to check on me. The nurse who stayed up all night with me was truly an angel. I cried a huge amount. I was in so much pain and so exhausted that after repeated pain injections I ended up vomiting everything;; I really respect nurses. ㅠㅠ! After one night passed, I started to come to my senses a bit and felt like I could survive. And while changing clothes before discharge, I looked in the mirror and was honestly shocked... I thought, can a person really swell up this much? In other reviews people didn’t seem to swell much right after surgery....... but I was really swollen to the point of bursting.. It wasn’t just contouring surgery; my nose tip was crooked, so I also had septum correction / correction again using ear cartilage, and I had an endotine forehead lift too, so it took a long time. Also, my blood pressure tends to be a little high, so I swelled a lot.. I don’t have much facial fat to begin with and I normally don’t swell easily, so I thought I wouldn’t swell muchㅋㅋㅋ I was seriously mistaken; I don’t think I’m suited for surgery
The endotine forehead lift I had along with contouring surgery is also just as satisfying as the contouring. The doctor noticed and told me that when I opened my eyes even a little wider or made expressions, a lot of wrinkles formed on my forehead, and explained that it was because I didn’t have enough strength to open my eyes, so I was using my forehead muscles to open them! I had no idea. ㅠㅠ He said it was a relatively simple endoscopic forehead lift, and showed me before-and-after photos of other patients; they were exactly the same case as mine. The effect looked so good, and he said the incision part was smaller than one finger joint, inside the scalp, with only three spots, so I decided to do it. Right after surgery, I felt like opening my eyes had always been this easy, and I could open them much more naturally and widely. Even the fine wrinkles around my eyes seemed to smooth out! Starting about a month later, the forehead sensation gradually came back, and there was no discomfort when washing my hair either. I can feel some foreign-body sensation at the three spots where the endotine was inserted, but from 3 to 4 months it noticeably decreased, and now at 6 months I don’t feel any foreign-body sensation at all.
As for the nose tip correction, I had no experience with nose surgery at all, and since I used to suck my finger as a baby and lift my nose that way, I had a habit? of sorts ;; my septum was crooked and my nostrils were uneven. Since I was already having surgery for a crooked nose, I thought about whether to use silicone from the start to build it up, but after consulting with the doctor, we decided not to use an implant for augmentation since that didn’t match my preference for naturalness, and instead to correct only the crooked nose tip using ear cartilage and lift it slightly :) At first, for a few months, I worried a lot that the nose tip looked too raised and I looked like Pinocchio, and that it would never become natural ㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠㅠ But now it has become naturally beautiful along my original nose line, and I’m very satisfied! The stitch removal hurt so much.. Since it’s a hospital specializing in contouring surgery, I didn’t expect them to be good with the nose too, but the entire face looks so natural and not at all overdone, so I’m extremely satisfied. I am satisfied, I amㅎㅎㅎㅎ
- After surgery, facial sensation: there was a lot of swelling and numbness, but I never felt like the area I touched wasn’t my own skin. The sensation was there from the beginning, which was surprising! I had even seen posts warning that you might not notice if food spilled while eating, so I was worried, but I can feel even each grain of rice. ㅋㅋㅋ For the first week, I couldn’t open my mouth much, so I only ate porridge with a plastic baby spoon, and after the stitches were removed at the one-week mark, I even ate jajangmyeonㅎㅎ By the second week I could eat everything except tough meat. At one month I ate beef!! Pure happiness ㅠㅠ I drank alcohol at one month too. I really held out well. Phew. I thought I needed to be careful about opening my mouth, but at the one-month follow-up, the doctor said I shouldn’t keep the habit of not opening it much because it could stiffen, so starting from one month I practiced opening my mouth too, and by two months I could eat a hamburger! Until then I could only open it about two fingers wide. But time really is the best medicine; gradually and naturally, everything opens up. Right now I can open my mouth just like before, enough to go to the dentist.
I’ve organized the photos first. I’m also opening up the monster-like look right after surgery for the first time ㅋㅋㅋ The records I exchanged with my friends back then have really become memories. I’ll leave another review at the one-year mark! If anyone has other questions, send me a message and I’ll answer based on what I know from my own experience :D Thanks for reading this long post. I hope everyone resolves their complexes and becomes pretty ♡
좋아요 15