00:01Although ears are really a tiny feature, they do frame our face and they can
00:09either enhance or take away from our beauty.
00:18I became aware of my stretch earlobe. I think in college because I was wearing
00:23these hoop earrings and at the part where you connect them it's supposed to
00:27stop there but it would just keep going and the whole hoop would just go through.
00:34My earlobe has expanded a lot and now I can barely wear any type of earrings
00:39especially if they're heavy. My name is Rachel and I'm gonna get earlobe
00:44fillers. I probably knew that I wanted to be a doctor since I was about eight
00:51years old. So the two fields that I really enjoyed when I got to medical school are
00:56surgery and psychiatry and in dermatology it really is an overlap of the two.
01:01There's a lot of psychiatry and psychology that goes into treating skin, that goes
01:05into dealing with skin cancer patients and I really love that aspect because I
01:08really love engaging in patient care and talking to my patients. I am seeing more
01:14and more patients come into my office with complaints about their earlobes. So a
01:18lot of people say why the earlobes this is just far too much vanity but there
01:22really is an emotional component to wearing jewelry and so not being able to
01:26wear them it really takes something away from a lot of my patients and so it's
01:30something that's really important to kind of restore that quality to them. Beyond
01:33the fact that earrings are beautiful and it helps to frame your face there truly is a
01:37sentimental quality to a lot of the jewelry that we wear. My name is Dr. Michelle
01:42Henry. I am a Manhattan-based dermatologist and dermatologic surgeon.
01:47I found out about earlobe fillers because I was actively on Google searching for a way to fix this.
01:54Initially I thought maybe I could get it sewed up and then just leave it as is. I just won't
01:59have
01:59a piercing anymore and then I think one day my co-worker sent me a video of this woman just
02:06getting
02:06her earlobe injected with fillers and it looked amazing. It like closed up the stretch and I was like
02:13oh my god this is what I've been waiting for for years. Initially how I started doing this is that
02:19I'd have women that would come in and maybe I was filling their lips or their cheeks and we had
02:24just
02:24a touch of filler left so we would inject their ears and they really didn't realize before that
02:29what a big role that played in their overall assessment of how they look in their youthfulness.
02:33As we get a little bit older our collagen starts to deteriorate and when that happens the ears start to
02:39deflate they start to sag they start to become floppy. Another problem I see in the office is
02:44something that I call fashionista ears. So these are really young fashionable women who are wearing
02:49maybe really large statement earrings that can be quite heavy and so with time they start to pull
02:55on the piercing side and that piercing side starts to stretch and stretch and stretch and become
03:00elongated and eventually it might even tear through the ear. In middle school there was a phase where
03:05everyone was so into the gauge earrings and they come in like different colors and they look like
03:11unicorn horns. I really like them so I bought them and I tried to like stuff it in myself so
03:16over time
03:16it just stretched out to the way it is now. So when you look at her ears you'll notice that
03:22her piercing
03:23side has become longer and longer and longer and she's a very young girl that damage can start quite early.
03:29I'm very excited about the procedure. From what I've seen it looks like it makes a drastic difference
03:36and I hope that it'll allow me to go back into wearing any type of earrings I want to.
03:42First step of the procedure is to actually numb the ear. We use a very strong topical numbing cream
03:48to reduce the pain of the injection.
03:54So my filler of choice is hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is essentially a complex sugar.
04:02It's very important when we're injecting the skin to avoid infection.
04:09I like to inject very slowly introducing small aloe clots into the ear at a time.
04:20And all you really feel is a tiny pinch.
04:27And after that you feel a gentle filling of the product which is not uncomfortable.
04:38I like to watch the earlobe slowly fill and to watch the piercing side slowly contract.
04:49You inject until the area looks full and looks plump. And until the piercing side contracts in a way that
04:56you like.
05:07I typically try to overfill the area just a bit because when the swelling goes down you're going to
05:13lose some of the immediate effect.
05:23After injecting I gently massage the area to make sure that the product is nice and even.
05:31And then we ice. By the fourth day the swelling will start to go down.
05:36I don't expect you to have swelling for more than about five or six days.
05:40I typically ask my patients to wait about one to two weeks before starting to wear earrings again.
05:47It didn't really hurt. It just felt like something was stretching through your skin rather than pain.
05:54The process was actually much shorter than I thought it would be.
05:58I think when I went into this process I was just looking for instant gratification but I think I just
06:04have to wait it out. Now I don't have to worry about if the earring is going to stretch out
06:09my earlobes
06:10even more because all the filler around it is going to hold up the earring in its perfect place.
