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.
00:33My 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
00:56are surgery and psychiatry and in dermatology it really is an overlap of
01:00the two. There's a lot of psychiatry and psychology that goes into treating skin
01:04that goes into dealing with skin cancer patients and I really love that aspect
01:08because I really love engaging in patient care and talking to my patients.
01:12I am seeing more and more patients come into my office with complaints about
01:16their earlobes. So a lot of people say why the earlobes this is just far too much
01:21vanity but there really is an emotional component to wearing jewelry and so not
01:26being able to wear them it really takes something away from a lot of my patients
01:29and so it's something that's really important to kind of restore that
01:32quality to them beyond the fact that earrings are beautiful and it helps to
01:35frame your face there truly is a sentimental quality to a lot of the
01:39jewelry that we wear. My name is Dr. Michelle Henry. I am a Manhattan-based
01:44dermatologist and dermatologic surgeon.
01:47I found out about earlobe fillers because I was actively on Google searching for a
01:53way to fix this. Initially I thought maybe I could get it sewed up and then just
01:57leave it as is. I just won't have a piercing anymore and then I think one day my
02:02co-worker sent me a video of this woman just getting her earlobe injected with
02:08fillers and it looked amazing. It like closed up the stretch and I was like oh my
02:13god this is what I've been waiting for for years. Initially how I started doing
02:19this is that I'd have women that would come in and maybe I was filling their
02:22lips or their cheeks and we had just a touch of filler left so we would inject
02:26their ears and they really didn't realize before that what a big role that
02:30played in their overall assessment of how they look in their youthfulness. As we
02:34get a little bit older our collagen starts to deteriorate and when that
02:37happens the ears start to deflate they start to sag they start to become floppy.
02:42Another problem I see in the office is something that I call fashionista ears.
02:46So these are really young fashionable women who are wearing maybe really large
02:51statement earrings that can be quite heavy and so with time they start to pull
02:55on the piercing site and that piercing site starts to stretch and stretch and
02:59stretch and become elongated and eventually it might even tear through the
03:03ear. In middle school there was a phase where everyone was so into the gauge
03:07earrings and they come in like different colors and they look like unicorn horns.
03:12I really liked them so I bought them and I tried to like stuff it in myself so
03:16over time it just stretched out to the way it is now. When you look at her ears
03:21you'll notice that her piercing site has become longer and longer and longer and
03:25she's a very young girl that damage can start quite early. I'm very excited about
03:31the procedure. From what I've seen it looks like it makes a drastic difference and I
03:36hope 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
03:48numbing cream to reduce the pain of the injection so my filler of choice is
03:56hyaluronic acid. Hyaluronic acid is essentially a complex sugar. It's very
04:03important when we're injecting the skin to avoid infection. I like to inject very
04:10slowly introducing small aloe clots into the ear at a time and all you really feel
04:21is a tiny pinch. And after that you feel a gentle filling of the product which is not
04:30uncomfortable.
04:38I like to watch the ear lobe slowly fill and to watch the piercing site slowly
04:43contract. You inject until the area looks full and looks plump and until the piercing site
04:54contracts in a way that you like.
05:07I typically try to overfill the area just a bit because when the swelling goes down you're
05:12going to lose 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.
05:33By the fourth day the swelling will start to go down. I don't expect you to have swelling
05:37for 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
05:45again.
05:47It didn't really hurt. It just felt like something was stretching through your skin rather than
05:52pain.
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.
06:03But I think I just have to wait it out.
06:05Now I don't have to worry about if the earring is going to stretch out my ear lobes even more
06:10because all the filler around it is going to hold up the earring in its perfect place.
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