Dr. Cara McDonald

You can feel it if you put your fingers at the back of your jaw and bite down.

You can feel that muscle bulge.

Yeah.

In some people, particularly certain ethnicities, Asians especially, have a naturally very big mass at a muscle and it makes the lower face look very square and wide and it can also make the face look more round.

But that masseter muscle can also cause problems with grinding your teeth, breaking your teeth, jaw pain, headaches, especially morning headaches.

So it can be symptomatic.

It's called bruxism.

Or it can be aesthetic where it causes a sort of bottom heavy square round face.

We treat it for both indications.

So one's sort of a medical indication technically, although it's not covered by any medical, you know, insurance or Medicare or anything.

And the other is an aesthetic indication.

But either way, what happens is you shrink that muscle down and so the lower face looks a lot slimmer.

A lot of people think it will make their jawline less defined because you'd think, you know, if you've got this big muscle there, you'll have a, you know, big jawline, but actually it sort of reveals the bone.

So the jawline looks more defined because you don't have this sort of bulge that's holding the skin out over it.

Yeah.

So usually you have sort of more jawline definition.

In an older person, you can perhaps get a little bit of extra jowling because there's that sort of skin held up and out.

But in those cases, if you're treating it for symptomatic reasons, then you can use some fillers, for example, along the jawline to help hold the skin back and out.

Absolutely.

I could do a whole hour on this one.