Ozempic® Face and Facial Plastic Surgery: What We Want You to Know

A new class of weight loss drugs is helping millions of people to shed unhealthy pounds, but there have been a few unwanted side effects — such as a hollowed-out face, dubbed Ozempic® face.

You’re one of the millions of people who are pushing the needle down on the scale using the new class of weight loss drugs, including Ozempic®, Wegovy®, and Mounjaro®, and you’re loving the results. Well, most of them.

You’re not so thrilled with the effect that the significant weight loss has had on your face — you feel like you’re looking more sickly and sunken in now. You're certainly not alone — there’s even a phrase to describe this new look: Ozempic Face.

Our own Dr. Jonathan Zelken underwent weight loss and describes his road to Ozmepic face here. As a leading facial surgeon, however, Dr. Zelken wants you to know that there are solutions for facial rejuvenation after weight loss.

While facelifts still reign supreme in terms of facial surgeries, with nearly 80,000 in the United States in 2023, there have been increases in chin and cheek implants, as well as fat grafting, and we feel these procedures will become even more popular as people address thinning due to weight loss.

How weight loss affects your face

When you lose weight, you can’t target where you shed the pounds — that’s up to your body. So, while you’d love to only lose weight in your belly and thighs, the loss can happen everywhere, including in your face.

Just beneath your skin, your face has subcutaneous fat compartments that greatly contribute to your appearance and youthful looks. In fact, there are many different fat compartments in your face, including your:

Nasolabial fold
Medial, middle, and lateral temporal-cheek fat compartments
Three compartments of forehead fat
Three compartments of under-eye fat
Jowl fat

When you embark on a medically induced weight loss journey and shed pounds quickly, this loss can impact any of these fat compartments.

Restoring youthful volume in your face after weight loss

If you feel that your face is prematurely and rapidly aging due to weight loss, there are many ways in which we can fight back against this side effect.

For starters, we can try dermal fillers to replace lost volume in most areas of your face, but these cosmetic injectables are limited in scope.

If you have significant facial fat loss, we can consider fat grafting. In this procedure, we inject fat from one area of your body into your face.

We can also consider facial implants, an exciting area of facial surgery. Our practice offers off-the-shelf implants and custom PEEK implants (PEEK stands for polyetheretherketone).

Off-the-shelf implants perform exceptionally well when augmenting your chin or adding volume to the area just under your nose.

We’re seeing great success with custom implants, which restore volume in your cheeks or redefine your jaw. As the name suggests, these implants are manufactured especially for your facial structure and goals. To better understand how this works, check out this video.

Who’s a good candidate for facial volumization

We want to emphasize an important point about restoring volume to your face after weight loss: make sure your weight is stable.

For elective procedures like fat grafting and facial implants, it’s essential that your weight is within the target range and that you feel confident that you’ll stay there. If you gain weight after facial volumization, you’ll add fat to the newly restored volume and go in the opposite direction from the sunken-in look.

We also want you to be in good health for your surgery, which means maintaining a stable weight.

If you feel that, after reading this, you want to explore putting the finishing touches on your weight loss through facial volumization, simply call Jonathan Zelken, MD, in Newport Beach, California, at (949) 432-4730. You can also request an appointment using our online booking tool.