+++ I’ll also upload photos from right after surgery.
First, the before photos. My face was a bit long and I had cheekbones. They don’t show up well in the photos, but there was a bit of a beauty filter, so my face came out slimmer.
In order:
1. This was taken right before surgery, after even the facial design was drawn lol lol I thought I should leave a before photo 2. Also my side profile right before surgery. My cheekbones were pretty prominent. 3. The day after surgery, my face was seriously… the swelling was no joke, like it was about to spill over. I thought my face was going to burst 4. Day 7 after surgery. I went to the clinic and had the cheekbone stitches removed, but the swelling was still no joke..ㅠㅠ
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Hello.
I remembered how I used to search through all kinds of communities before surgery, looking for information until my eyes felt like they would fall out, so I’m leaving a review too. It’s been about one month since my surgery, and I had the 3 procedures: cheekbones, square jaw, and chin.
I’ll share the clinic-selection criteria and tips that I personally thought about. Originally I wanted to write everything together, including the review right after surgery, but the post got longer than I expected, so I’ll write that afterward. I’m leaving this much detail partly because I don’t want you to waste time, and also because I hope younger people, now that the college entrance exam is over, won’t get swayed by advertisements and go somewhere wrong.
Oh, before that, I’ll write about why I wanted facial contouring.
In my case, everyone around me said I didn’t really need to do it. Honestly, I think everyone will agree that if you’re not satisfied when you look at your own face in the mirror, it’s no use no matter how much people around you try to stop you. I was like that too. And I think everyone has their own standards. Standards of beauty, and the line you have in mind for yourself, like “If I look about this much better, I’ll be satisfied.” For me, as I got older and kept seeing pretty faces pouring out from media and social media, maybe I was brainwashed to some degree too, but I think I developed my own standard.
Rather than the so-called pretty style with big eyes and a high, sharp nose, I wanted a face that had my own feeling to it and wouldn’t get tiresome even as time passed. I set my standards very clearly like that and looked at so many face photos. While looking through Instagram, if I thought someone was pretty or had a nice vibe, I went into their account and even looked through their past feed, building up as much of a database as possible. Then in between, I kept coming back to this community, reading reviews and progress updates, and making a surgery plan, but I often stopped midway. The reason was that when I read posts about side effects, it scared me, so I would put it down thinking I should just live as I am, then I’d get motivated again, and that repeated.
This year, as I managed to save up money, I made up my mind and had the surgery. Everyone, please make your decision while keeping all kinds of side effects in mind: your skin can sag, your face can droop, your cheekbones may not fuse, and so on. That’s why I thought even more carefully about choosing the clinic.
From here on, these are clinic-selection tips. In my case, first of all, if there was even one negative post, I absolutely crossed that clinic off. I also crossed off clinics with excessive advertising. And when I went for a consultation, if the consultant felt too young and lightweight, I crossed them off too.
The reason is that I thought there could be a chance that such a consultant had not been there long, and if that person was assigned to me, there was a higher chance I was an event case or that a shadow doctor would come in because the price was cheap. You know consultants all receive incentives, right? They have to secure a lot of customers. The newer the consultant, the more benefits they give customers, and their job is to get people onto the operating table first. So don’t do things like plastic surgery model offers or half-price discounts. You become a test subject.
That’s why people go to clinics where someone they know through word of mouth has already had surgery: they want to avoid becoming that kind of case. Once you lie down on the operating table like that, you ultimately become a test subject. You become one more clinical-experience case for the doctor. So I automatically crossed off large clinics, and when I started consultations with doctors, if the doctor was too young, only confidently said everything was possible, or seemed poor in character as a person, I crossed them off without question.
Doctors are people just like everyone else, but because they learned one field called medicine, they are beings who can do whatever they want with our bodies. But if such a person is poor in character, what I mean is, no one knows what’s inside another person’s heart. I haven’t lived an extremely long life, but there aren’t many doctors who work with a sense of calling for the profession. But in a way that can’t be helped either, because this is a society where money is the most important thing, so first of all they become obsessed with making money. So the moment they step outside the clinic, they go around doing all kinds of ugly things. You see it in the news a lot, right? News about doctors. But “my doctor would never be that kind of person”? That’s rationalization. When a patient’s surgery fails, doctors think of it as something that happens, one failure in their life, that anyone can make mistakes. It’s just that the target happened to be that patient. That’s how they think. So they take down the signboard and open a clinic under another name. They don’t take responsibility for the patient. They’ll think that patient was just unlucky.
So I even kept surgical failure in mind when choosing a clinic. That’s why I crossed off all doctors whose impression seemed poor in quality. Ex) a face that looks like someone you’d see at a club; too young; says everything is definitely possible.
When I entered a clinic, I looked at the doctor’s profile as a basic thing, and even how the clinic was designed. Usually decent doctors, and those confident in their careers, openly hang up awards, diplomas, published papers, or award history. But you have to look carefully at those too. Don’t look at really useless things like “participated in some society,” “published a paper, but it’s not on facial contouring, it’s on rhinoplasty,” or “attended a seminar.” Look for whether they truly built experience in the facial contouring field.
At the clinic where I had surgery, all of those things were basically in the doctor’s room, and there was even a plaque from a club congratulating him on graduation from when he attended Seoul National University. It was a guitar club.. lol So I felt a bit of humanity there too, and I was more drawn to it.
Next are Googling tips. Once I had one clinic in mind, I really searched through every little thing. \
OO clinic side effects, OO clinic review, OO clinic real, OO plastic surgery facial contouring, OO plastic surgery nose, (if they said they’re good at contouring but tons of nose-related articles came up, then out) OO plastic surgery breast, (same reason) OO plastic surgery broker and so on.
I changed the keywords little by little and searched, then read all the posts.
What’s important here is: Don’t look at reviews on the clinic bulletin board. Don’t trust reviews from too-famous Naver cafes. Rather, places like Instiz, you know, where many younger people go, are more likely to have real reviews.
And tips for filtering reviews on this community or famous cafes: If the review photos openly show the face? If the before and after is completely goddess-level? There’s a chance they had surgery with benefits from the clinic. For people like this, they’ll probably do the surgery especially well, right? Because they’re going to upload a review. They’ll make sure it doesn’t fail, right? So you need to keep this point in mind when looking at those reviews. I’m not saying it’s 100% true, but I mean keep it in mind to some degree. Don’t trust them too much.
Rather, if they cover their face and upload it so only the contour is visible, or if it’s a photo and the background in the photo is really just a room background, like a messy bed with things spread out or blankets lying around, or it looks like it was taken in a bathroom, then it’s more likely to be a review written by an ordinary person, right?
And when you Google, look at that clinic’s promotional activity too. News articles and things like that, and whether they upload a series on YouTube using ordinary-person models, or look at old materials from around 2010 or 2006. Just look at them. You start to get a feel for it. The clinic I went to had a series of videos from some year in the 2000s with ordinary-person models, and the consultant appears in them. But that consultant is still doing consultations. So what does that mean? If a consultant has worked there that long, it means they can handle complaints if there are any, or that the clinic is that decent. In that kind of way. There’s always something you can connect, you know? So look at as much as possible. Whether it’s news, videos, reviews, ratings, whatever.
And once you start going around for in-person consultations, make sure to take notes one by one while looking carefully at the points above. Results of the consultant consultation, things the doctor said during consultation, career details hanging on the clinic walls, and so on. I thought I could remember everything in my head, but once I turned around, I forgot... lol Since I went to so many clinics, they got mixed up too.
If you’re sitting on the sofa waiting at the clinic and a customer comes in to complain? Out. If the doctor comes out during surgery to do a consultation? Leave without looking back. If you’re waiting for consultation but there are no facial contouring patients, only nose surgery patients. Out. Once, when I went for a consultation, because the day I would have surgery was a weekend and a holiday period, I asked roughly what number surgery I would be that day and how many patients were having surgery that day. The consultant said there would probably be many because it was a holiday period, and I immediately gave up on that clinic. Even though it had been one of my candidates. The clinic where I had surgery did only two people even though it was a long holiday. On the day of my surgery, I was in the afternoon time slot, and just as I arrived, the morning surgery had just finished and the doctor came out. And after my surgery, he checked my progress and then went home. Like this, when you go around for consultations, stay alert and observe. Check this and that, and prepare thoroughly.
You’re going to live with that face for your entire life, so why do you choose a clinic so easily, everyone..ㅠㅠㅠ Please don’t do that. Think about it like crazy, invest time, and do all the online and in-person legwork. Put on a thick skin and beg for surgery information in communities. Only a lot of information and a database can save you from the flood of clinic advertisements, brokers, and fake reviews.
Now that the college entrance exam is over, younger people will start going to clinics, and I really hope those young, fresh-faced, pretty people don’t end up in the news. Whew, I wrote for over an hour.. lol
Next time, I’ll bring a post related to the surgery.
If you leave questions, I’ll answer as much as I can.
Thank you.
ps. There’s another cafe I’m active in too, and I’ll post the same writing there as well... If you happen to see it, please don’t misunderstand and think I’m a broker.
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