“best facial contouring surgery Korea”: Five Things a Clinic List Can't Show About Your Bone

Please read on before you book or decide anything, because bone is not something you can redo.

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Im Young Min

Chief Director · Board-certified in Plastic Surgery

• — Ph.D. in Medicine
• — Internship and residency, Seoul St. Mary's Hospital
• — Board-certified plastic surgeon, Seoul St. Mary's Hospital

After reading you will know how to read clinic recommendation posts, who should be cutting the bone, what a CT plan shows, and what happens after you fly home, so you can decide whether to ask a clinic about your own face.

Hello, I'm Im Young Min, Chief Director and a board-certified plastic surgeon.

I trained at Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, and I share the facial contouring centre at VG Plastic Surgery with Dr. Park Sang Wook, also a board-certified plastic surgeon, who is a member of a maxillofacial contouring research group.

I wrote this because many people treat a ranking as if it were advice for their own face, when the lists have never seen their bone.

Short answer: no ranking can name the best operation for you, because it depends on your bone, your nerves and your soft tissue. A CT plan and a surgeon you can check tell you more than a list does.

Why threads about facial contouring in Korea sound alike

Most threads describe the first two weeks well and the first year badly. They cover the swelling, the hotel, the compression band and the interpreter. They rarely say which bone was cut, how much was taken, or who was watching the patient's breathing.

The search results are noisy for a second reason. Type “best facial contouring surgery Korea” or just “Korean facial” and you get spa treatments, glass skin facials, aqua peels and skincare shops in San Diego or Houston. Facial contouring is a different thing altogether. It is bone surgery on the cheekbones, jaw angle or chin, usually under general anaesthesia, with nerves running close to where the surgeon works. A list that mixes the two isn't measuring anything you need.

Star ratings mostly reflect the stay: reception, interpreters, how quickly messages were answered. Those things matter on a trip. They tell you very little about how a cheekbone was set back or where a jaw cut sat relative to the nerve.

How do you read a clinic recommendation post?

Read it for what you can check. A useful post names the surgeon, the operation and the bone involved. If a post only names a clinic and a feeling, there's nothing to check. Five questions sort posts quickly:

1. Does it name who operated, and can you find that surgeon's board certification under their own name?
2. Does it say which bone changed (cheekbone body, arch, jaw angle, chin), or only “V-line”?
3. Was a CT taken before the plan was fixed?
4. Who ran the anaesthesia: a full-time anesthesiologist, a visiting one, or does the post not say?
5. Was it written at week two or at month six? Early swelling hides a lot.

A post that skips questions one and four hasn't told you much, sponsored or not. The same reading habit works for other parts of the face, too. Our checklist on how to check a facelift surgeon in Seoul applies it to a different layer of tissue.

Who will actually cut the bone?

The name on your consent form should belong to a board-certified plastic surgeon whose training you can look up before you fly. Here, four board-certified plastic surgeons divide eyes, nose, facial contouring, body and breast between them. Which centre each one belongs to, and where they trained, is published under their own name.

Two of us cover facial contouring. He belongs to the Maxillofacial Contouring Surgery Research Group and is a full member of the Korean Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association. His work centres on nose and facial contouring, the two centres that work with bone and cartilage. My own credentials, including full membership of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), are listed on my profile page.

Whichever clinic you're considering, ask plainly: who will operate, and is that the person I'm meeting today? Before that conversation, it helps to know which contouring operation matches cheekbone, jaw or chin width, so you can tell whether the plan you're offered fits the part of your face that bothers you.

What the CT shows that your selfie can't

A photo shows width. A CT shows bone thickness, the nerve canal, and how the left and right sides really differ. The clinic's contouring page sums it up in two lines. Nerves and bone thickness are mapped on CT. And because bone does not grow back, anything that doesn't need to go stays.

Three things usually shape a contouring plan when a surgeon reads the scan:

• The jaw nerve. The inferior alveolar nerve runs inside the lower jaw toward the chin. A Korean paper on mandibular angle contouring (Journal of the Korean Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, 2003) is devoted to keeping the cut clear of this nerve. How close the canal sits limits how much of the angle can come off.
• Which part of the cheekbone. The arch and the body of the cheekbone are different structures. The 2013 paper “Concept of Reduction Malarplasty” in Archives of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery is about how that reduction is planned.
• The soft tissue on top. Thick or loosening cheeks may not follow the bone neatly, so age and skin laxity become part of the plan.

If your concern is the lower face as one line, our article on shaping the jawline and chin together in V-line surgery explains how the two are planned together.

Say you are 29, you have a wide lower face, and one side of your jaw looks heavier than the other in photos. You think you need jaw reduction on both sides. On the CT, I would first check where the nerve runs through the jaw and how much bone is on each side, since the heavier side may be bone and the other side may be muscle or soft tissue.

That could mean working on one side more than the other, or leaving a part alone, and you would not see that in a selfie.

Who watches your breathing while you're asleep?

Here, three board-certified anesthesiologists work full time, and one is dedicated to every operation. They monitor blood pressure, pulse and breathing from the first injection until you are awake again. They do not perform cosmetic surgery. Their only job is to keep you safe while it happens.

The anaesthesia team also assesses underlying conditions in advance. Bring a list of your medications, any sleep apnoea diagnosis and any past reactions to anaesthesia to the consultation.

Some people ask about adding another operation to the same trip, such as liposuction for body contouring or incisional or non-incisional double eyelid surgery. Whether that makes sense depends on total operating time and your health, so it's an anaesthesia question as much as a surgical one.

What decides the cost of facial contouring surgery?

The cost of facial contouring, including surgery for facial asymmetry, depends on which bones are involved. Reducing the cheekbones, the jaw angle or the chin are different operations, and an uneven face often needs more than one of them. The amount of bone to be moved, and whether one side or both sides are corrected, changes the length of the operation. The type of anaesthesia and the monitoring it needs also count, as do the days you stay in Korea for checks and the follow-up after you go home.

Two people who search for the same operation can therefore need quite different plans. To get the figure for your case, send a front photo and a side photo on WhatsApp and ask for it.

Risks a ranking never lists

Facial contouring carries specific risks, and a clinic list mentions none of them. The common ones are swelling and bruising that take weeks to months to settle, and temporary numbness in the cheeks, lower lip or chin. Less common are lasting numbness if the inferior alveolar nerve is injured during jaw work, uneven sides, and problems specific to cheekbone reduction: sagging cheek tissue, or bone that heals out of its intended position.

A Korean paper on preventing complications and managing unfavourable results in reduction malarplasty (Archives of Plastic Surgery, 2008) covers these problems. It also gives you a useful set of questions for any consultation. How is the bone fixed? What happens if one side heals differently? Who sees me if it does? Bleeding, infection and facial nerve weakness are rarer still.

Some people should wait or not have the operation at all: anyone whose facial bones are still growing, anyone with a medical condition that makes long general anaesthesia unsafe until it's controlled, and anyone hoping a change in bone shape will settle a feeling it can't reach. Recovery and the final shape differ from person to person. Whether you are a candidate is decided at the in-person consultation, after the CT.

If numbness or the flight home is what's stopping you from booking, put it in writing. On WhatsApp, send the area you want changed (cheekbones, jaw angle or chin) and the month you could travel, with that question attached.

What happens after you fly home?

Plan your follow-up at home before you book the flight to Seoul. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's medical tourism guidance tells travellers to talk with a doctor at home before the trip, take copies of their medical records, and arrange follow-up care for when they get back. After bone surgery, that means finding a local plastic or maxillofacial surgeon who is willing to see you if something changes.

Ask any clinic for the operative details in a form your doctor at home can read: which bones were cut, which segments, and how they were fixed. Swelling after contouring can take months to settle, so judge your face at six months rather than at your two-week check.

What is usually normal and what deserves a call:

• Usually expected: swelling that goes down slowly, tightness when chewing, and numbness that improves bit by bit.
• Message the clinic and see a local doctor: swelling that suddenly gets worse on one side, fever, discharge from an incision, a change in how your teeth meet, or numbness that spreads instead of fading.

Men considering a jaw change often have different goals, such as keeping some definition at the angle. Our piece on how men approach plastic surgery in Korea is a useful companion read. The clinic is at 635 Nonhyeon-ro, Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

Your search for the best facial contouring surgery Korea brought you to lists. One photo is enough to start a conversation about your own face, and you can ask before booking anything. On WhatsApp, send a front photo and a side-profile photo, and ask the one question you most want answered: which bone do you think is the issue, and is it the right place to start? When you come to Seoul, I examine you in person and recommend what fits your face.

Related pages:

• Facial Contouring surgery at VG Plastic Surgery