Dr. Oscar Ramirez: Beauty is Bone Deep
Jennifer Niskanen
“The common view is that beauty is skin deep, but in my view beauty is more than that. From a physical point of view, beauty is closer down to the bone, especially on the face. A good facial structure will determine if a face is beautiful or not,” Dr. Oscar Ramirez.
Skeletal structure provides lift, support, angles and contour relief to make faces more attractive and younger looking, according to Dr. Oscar Ramirez (http://www.ramirezmd.com/). With that in mind, he designed ten for more than ten different facial implants and the RZ Mandibular Matrix System, as well as a complete line of EndoFacelift™ instruments. These instruments and implants were critical to facilitate the many surgical procedures that Dr Ramirez has invented to beautify and rejuvenate the face.
His porous, polyethylene implants have special channels that allow the tissue and blood vessels to grow right into them, allowing them to actually become a part of the face’s structure. This means that they require very exacting techniques and dexterity to attach them to the bone, but they are a big improvement on common silicone implants, which tend to erode the bone and move over time.
Recent studies show that facial bones become smaller and thinner with aging, degrading over time, as shown by three dimensional CAT scans. This loss of bone structure, however, can be safely and easily replaced with implants for rejuvenation and beautification. They can then provide a foundation for working with the soft tissues of the face, the fat layer, the muscles and the skin. Bone grafts from the hips or other areas can also be used, but that is a major and much more risky surgery, which is usually reserved for patients with congenital anomalies.
Dr. Ramirez’s RZ Mandibular Matrix System restructures and redefines the whole lower jaw, face, chin and neck with multiple implants for people who have lost bone mass because they no longer have teeth or for facial enhancement. For example, Dr. Ramirez says that a strong chin and jaw can give a face more authority or masculinity. Over time, women have also moved away from softer facial features to have more structure too. Implants can be placed on any part of the face, such as the cheeks, the lower and upper orbits, or the temples.
“If you peruse any glamour magazine, you can see that the most beautiful models have strong skeletal support in their faces. They have nice cheekbones. They have a good angle on the mandible and good definition in the neck and the chin,” Dr. Oscar Ramirez.
Face lifts simply rely on stretching and pulling, which results in tight, shiny skin around the ears and lateral cheeks with loose skin in the center of the face. Dr. Ramirez, however, specializes in facial, endoscopic rejuvenation and beautification, which addresses the central oval of the face, lifts in a more vertical direction, against gravity, with much smaller incisions. This elevates the brow and rejuvenates the mid-face, jaw line, chin and neck, without removing any skin for many patients, creating a more attractive, oval shape.
Dr. Ramirez is often called on to fix the mistakes of others too. He says that many surgeons shy away from doing such secondary surgeries because it’s always a challenge to repair someone else’s work. Scarring and distortion make it more difficult, so it can never be completely perfect. Dr. Ramirez points to rhinoplasty, in particular, as the most difficult procedure in plastic surgery because it involves bone, cartilage, different skin thicknesses and the actual airway of the nose, which needs to remain fully functional.
Complications can result from either aesthetics or functionality. Often, there can be issues with both. Additional materials and cartilage are required because all areas of the nose need special support to prevent collapse in the long-term when removing cartilage to make a nose smaller.
“When you do a rhinoplasty, you have to provide enough support, even to add extra support, whenever you do a to the new nose. And, that nose will look better at the beginning and ten years later,” Dr. Oscar Ramirez.
Body contouring is even more popular than facial surgeries, in Dr. Ramirez’s practice, including liposuction, breast augmentation and reduction, and work on the thighs or arms. Liposuction can even be done under local anesthesia right in his office, while patients are awake and only slightly sedated with minimal blood loss. Younger patients have more elasticity, so the skin on the abdomen and thighs contract better than in older patients who are over 40, or who have had children. They Those patients may also require abdominoplasty or removal skin and stretch marks.
Dr. Ramirez explains that, indeed, there’s an exact science to beauty through what is called the golden ratio also called divine proportions. which This describes certain anatomical mathematical proportions, which have been known since antiquity. Recently, this has also been popularized in books like “The DaVinci Code,” but it can also be used to create beautiful, well-balanced faces. This ratio was used and described by associated with the art of DaVinci and attributed to Fibonacci but the initial description was done by Euclid in “Elements” by 300 B.C. as well as Many other mathematicians and artists have intuitively used it because our brains seem to be hardwired to prefer objects with this special ratio.
“The golden ratio exists in beautiful objects in nature, in animals, and plants, and obviously, in different parts of the body. It happens that this mathematical relationship is 1 to 0.61 1.618 or if you put it in simplistic terms, it is about 2/3 to 1/3. Among the different segments of the face, for example, a beautiful person is somebody who has 1/3 on each of the segments of the face: on the upper, middle and lower face. this ratio,” Dr. Oscar Ramirez.
Dr. Ramirez is an international speaker on advanced plastic surgery techniques who has authored over one hundred fifty articles, as well as several textbooks on aesthetic surgery and endoscopic surgical techniques. He was also named one of 2,000 Outstanding Scientists in the 21st Century by the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England, for his contributions in plastic and reconstructive surgery. His more than 30 years of experience put him at the top of his field, so in this case, beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, its foundation is rock-solid.