Posted by Dr. Anil R. Shah
Dr. Shah was recently a special guest on Silhouette Radio’s Podcast hosted by the wonderful, Isis Richardson. This podcast is designed to help empower women from all backgrounds and ethnicities with body positivity.
Dr. Shah was able to share some of the plastic surgery trends and secrets that women of all colors can understand.
This audio podcast has been transcribed using an automated service. Please forgive any typographic errors or other transcription flaws.
Isis Richardson:
Hi silhouettes. We are here and we have an amazing episode where we are going to talk about facial plastic surgery. It’s something that many of the girls are considering on the platform, however, we’re in the era. Doctor of women are wanting to, you may be seeing it. They’re trying to reverse their Brazilian butt lifts, trying to get a little bit more skinny and definitely focusing on their face. So before we get into today’s episode, can you please go ahead and introduce yourself to our silhouettes?
Dr. Shah:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me here. So do you want me to call you Dr. Richardson? isis, what do you prefer?
Isis Richardson:
Oh my goodness. I’m not a doctor, but Isis is fine.
Dr. Shah:
Okay. I thought you were, I know you’re in the aesthetics realm, so I just kind of threw that out there. She’s like, okay, all good. Isis is cool. Awesome. Thank you for having me here. But I see ice sounds better. Okay. So I’m Dr. Anil Shah. I’m a facial plastic surgeon. I know you’re in New York and I used to be in New York, although I have a lot of patients from New York and I focus on the face, especially noses necks. And then just kind of like everything on the neck up the clavicles up, I really focus on and making that kind of work with the rest of the face and body.
Isis Richardson:
So before we get into the topic about face doctor, can you tell us what do you think of the term body positivity? It’s a term we’ve been using a lot all throughout our social media and when we interview our guests and what does it mean to you? And can a person that has cosmetic enhancement surgery, can they be body positive?
Dr. Shah:
Of course they can. You have to love who you are and most of the time when I’m changing someone, I’m changing to what they want and how they view themselves and you’re making this vision of what they are. All of us or a lot of us, especially female patients, wear makeup. And when we were in makeup, we’re contouring our nose how we want it to look. And for me, what I’m trying to do is help them achieve that look without the need for makeup. And then also we’re talking about cameras, angles and filters. So in reality, sometimes when you’re trying to make someone’s cheekbone stand out, sure we can kind of cont that with makeup, but oftentimes we can just kind of change the way that looks kind of in real life too. So what I’m trying to do is create the image that’s on the inside of their head onto the outside of their body.
Isis Richardson:
That’s amazing. And the reason that I asked that question is because being a surgery blogger and being someone that has high cosmetic enhancement surgery, the narrative, the running narrative is always issue that we don’t love ourselves and that’s why we’re altering ourselves. So we constantly have to fight against that stereotype that we’re doing it not because we didn’t like our ethnic nose or we didn’t like the fact that we may had a flat or smaller breast,
Dr. Shah:
But it’s interesting that I’ll have patients from this whole broad range of ages and I’ll have 16 year olds and sometimes 65 year olds. And if I talk to a 65-year-old who’s changing her nose, you know what she tells me? She’s thought about it every day since she was 16. And for me, I’m like, Hey, if this really bothers you and you’ve tried other things, why not just make the vision of what you want? Which on the inside, because lots of times things get altered. They get altered genetically sometimes, but altered, they get altered with trauma and other things beyond our control. So let’s make the vision of ourselves what we want.
Isis Richardson:
Absolutely. So doctor, can you speak to the difference of ethnic rhinoplasties and rhinoplasties of let’s say Caucasians and the difference that patients who look out for, because there’s a lot of doctors out here that if you paying them, they’ll do anything that you bring.
Dr. Shah:
Yeah, it is so different. I mean, you’re talking about different types of procedures and you have to match someone. You have to kind of understand as much as you can what that person’s about and what they’re trying to change and what their goals are. And I think for example, a lot of Caucasian patients, they want their nose to be smaller, but smaller is not a really good word. Smaller means they want their bridge lower. By the way, most of us want to kind of be in the middle, by the way. So if you have blonde hair, you want to have darker hair, if you have curly hair, you want straight hair. That kind of rules. So a lot of our Caucasian patients, they want their nose to be a smaller version, so they want their bridge a little lower, they want their tip maybe less projected, and they want everything in that kind of shape.
If I’m talking to, for example, one of my African-American patients, but first of all, there’s so many different types of African-American noses out there. So with that being said, classically, a lot of my African-American patients, they want their bridge maybe a little bit, not always, but sometimes a little taller here and a little bit more support so we can see that definition. And so it’s kind of different things in different balances and different techniques, and you really have to make sure it matches with that person’s identity and who they are and who their person is.
Isis Richardson:
So we heard that you had a patient that was on 90 Day Fiance. Can you tell us what that’s like to have patients that are in the entertainment industry on television? Do you feel a certain sense of pressure when it comes to their results more than, let’s say an everyday woman?
Dr. Shah:
I think of what you do and you do it over and over again. It’s sort of like you’ve done it so many times and you’ve done that. There’s really not that. And if your techniques are super solid, which I hope I think they are, you can create reproducible results over and over and over again. So having a person says, I have to look good and I want this result and that result, if you’ve really worked your whole life on these techniques, then when that person comes in, whether it’s patient X, Y, or Z, in my mind everyone’s a celebrity now. Everyone has social media, everyone has Instagram and that part of it. So whether they’re more public facing or maybe on different platforms, you have to assume that everyone’s your superstar.
Isis Richardson:
Can you tell us more about what inspired your career path?
Dr. Shah:
Yeah, I think it’s like, I wish I had this moment where you just wake up and this little stars in the sky and it says that you should do this and follow the star and all that. But I think it’s a culmination of a lot of different things that have kind of shaped me. And first of all, I have an uncle in the UK who’s a head and neck surgeon and super inspirational. I was always fascinated by what he was doing, how he was able to operate on the face and head and neck and do these really amazing surgeries. And the genesis of facial plastics is actually from a head and neck surgeon and it’s a Sir Gilles and a lot of the techniques that some of the techniques are actually developed by him. And so he was kind of inspirational to see these surgeries and learn about them.
And then I got involved in the fashion world for a little bit. And so getting involved in the fashion world, I was like, look at these two worlds collide. And then I had a chance to shadow a facial plastic surgeon. And when I put all those worlds together, I was like, you’re going to pay me to transform patients as head and neck anatomy. I mean, I would do this for free now don’t tell my patients, but it’s like the most, it’s the amazing privilege to have someone and to be able to transform someone and create this result and get a better functioning version of themselves. I mean, what a privilege. And so that was the moment.
Isis Richardson:
Okay, doctor, can you tell us about how does rhinoplasty impact breathing? Have you seen that good and also bad?
Dr. Shah:
Well, you’re dealing with this super important structure and it’s become way more common and way more popular now because again, there’s some books out there. There’s a book called Breathe by James Nestor, another book called the Oxygen Bandage. And what they’re talking about is how important it’s to breathe through your nose and mouth taping so you can breathe through your nose, all these types of things. So when you do a rhinoplasty, you have to respect the form. And I think in almost every patient, the septum is slightly crooked. So I always try to straighten that, maximize the function of the nose. And for me, I want the nose to be large on the inside open, but narrow on the outside or smaller, depending what the patient wants. So it’s the combination of the two. You have to respect form, you have to respect function.
Isis Richardson:
Doctor, what are your most favorite procedures to perform? And then what are you noticing as the most requested procedure from 2022 to 2023?
Dr. Shah:
They kind of go hand in hand. So probably the most popular procedure, there’s two procedures. Again, this might be biased because I’m a facial plastic surgeon, noses, they’re so hard to do and there’s not a lot of people who do nose as well. And so doing a nose, it can really make someone’s face magical and everyone sees a bad rhinoplasty, but they don’t see a good rhinoplasty. And when everything is just harmonized, the eyes stand out, the cheekbones stand out, the lips stand out in all the good ways. And what you have is this really harmonious balance of everything going together. So noses have always been in, but they’re really in right now and it’s a natural vibe that just kind of blends together. The other thing that’s super hot are jawlines and patients want this snatched jawline and the old techniques, they don’t work.
What people used to do is they used to come in and say, I want to do lipo, I want to do liposuction, I want to do Kybella. But it doesn’t change the anatomy for most people, a lot of people are not blessed with gorgeous anatomy. And so what they have to do is you have to lift up these deeper structures. And when you do that, you can take someone who even when they were in their teenage years and they looked not amazing, you can turn those necks into amazing, amazing necks. And it’s universally gorgeous. There’s a book out. The name of the author is Nancy Ekko. So she’s a Harvard professor. She went around the world and she was looking at every sort of, you name people from Europe, south America, Africa, Australia, Asia. And there is one universal thing that they found in universally attractive people because you see people from all over who are attractive and they’re like universally attractive, the one thing that was universally attractive, jawlines. And to create a gorgeous jawline, it can transform someone’s face.
Isis Richardson:
That is good to know, especially when you think about beauty across cultures, right? Because we know that sometimes beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and a lot of times we see that culture and beauty sometimes has a vast majority life. For example, when it comes to BBLs, before Brazilian butlers were trending, we know that in certain parts of Africa having bigger butts were always seen as beautiful. So it was very interesting to see that universal, there was still a standard of beauty and it wasn’t the body, it was the face, especially the jaw line.
Dr. Shah:
Absolutely amazing. And I think somewhere in us, we can look at something and it’s rare that we can determine that something is universally beautiful, honestly. But there’s a few things that are out there, but jaw and neck lines are one of them.
Isis Richardson:
So what is the average age of your patients? Are you seeing that women are getting many facelifts, a lot younger than before?
Dr. Shah:
I think you want to get a facelift when you’re ready to get a facelift. And I think that there’s a sweet spot. I don’t think 30 year olds getting facelift is a good idea because they’re not ready for that. There’s other things they can do, but when they’re ready. So I think a good age for a facelift and neck lift, if they’re thinking about that, a facelift especially, we’re talking next, you can do younger ages, you can do that in your twenties and thirties and forties just because if you’re really trying to just focus on the neck. But if you’re really trying to lift the face thinking more like late forties, early fifties is that sweet spot for a lot of patients. Now there’s exceptions of course. There’s some patients who can wait until they’re 55 and 60. There’s patients who don’t even need it at all. And so it’s really finding someone who’s going to tell you what you need and have that opinion to really make sure that you’re going to get the best look for you.
Isis Richardson:
Doctor, what do you think about nurses, nps that are doing injections? Do you think they know enough about facial anatomy to use filler and to transform patients’ faces?
Dr. Shah:
I think it depends on the nurse and it depends on the PA. If they’re trained properly, they can do amazing work. And the key is training. In my office, I have an amazing nurse, Jonathon, who’s been with me and I’ve gone back and taught Jonathon so many things. And Jonathon right now is such a pro. He’s treated so many high-end patients that it’s amazing and that part of it, he knows anatomy though. He’s taught and Jess is in the same way has been taught that way. And so if you’ve been taught properly and you know that foundation and you’re not pushing to overly object things, you’re going to do well. But on the other hand, the training I think as a standard overall in general is substandard. And what happens is I talked to, for example, one of my patients, I operated on her, she’s a nurse and she was an injector for, I think she was injector for six months and she said her training was to watch someone for three hours and then start injecting that same day.
And I was like, wow. And I go, how did you do? And she goes, I did horribly and I did a disservice to my patients and I felt really bad and I really wasn’t what I wanted to learn and I didn’t really have mentorship. So I think it really matters that that background is there, the background of anatomy and then getting the proper training. And so if you are a nurse or a PA and you’re doing injections, you probably could do an amazing job, but you have to make sure that they have that background behind them.
Isis Richardson:
Yes, that was always a concern that I’ve always had is the background training there to be able to transform a face, especially when we’re talking about a person’s face.
Dr. Shah:
Yeah, I mean surgical things are different, but injectables and lasers and all that. I mean, I would trust my own face with Jess and Jonathon and they would do an amazing job because I know they know the anatomy and they know what they’re look for in that part of it. But I wouldn’t say that universally because they might be closer to, but they’re also in the 99th percent of injectors if that’s out there. So they’re not, for example, Jonathon was with me for two to three years before he could inject. Jess was with me for six months, seven months before she was really injected. So they’re getting such intense training that their skillset is just above and beyond.
Isis Richardson:
Yeah, that’s amazing. Especially when we’re talking about two to three years before they can inject. Doctor, the farthest kind of patient has traveled to have their work done by you?
Dr. Shah:
Oh my god, I’ve had patients from all over. I’ve had India, Australia, I mean from all over. NSF. Part of it is fun, but it’s dealing with patients from farther away isn’t actually something that I first was doing this. I was excited to have someone from marketing countries and being so excited to have people wanting to see me for different things. But on the other hand, you still have to manage them like they’re a block away or two blocks away. And so thankfully with virtual consultations, I can follow up with them. And then the other part is I travel a lot, not because I like to, I do like to, but also because when I’m around and about, if I can meet up with one of my patients and make it a little bit easier for me to see them, then fantastic. So I think that idea with it is making sure that they can have some sort of follow-up appropriate follow-up is helpful.
Isis Richardson:
That’s amazing. Yes, especially I’ve been engaged in medical tourism and I have a lot of my followers on social media, they engage in social medical tourism as well. So I had, when my doctor from Istanbul, Turkey, he was in Miami, I was in Miami at the same time, we were able to see each other. So it is rewarding when you have a doctor that travels because then you are able to connect with your patients both present and future in that specific there now
Dr. Shah:
Absolutely makes a difference. Go ahead.
Isis Richardson:
Yeah. Can you talk about skincare doctor? What are some skincare tips and techniques, even though we know usually skincare is dermatology, but what are you seeing that patients really, really leave when they come into you?
Dr. Shah
I think the biggest difference is a lot of patients are not using medical grade skincare products and sometimes they get frustrated. For example, my wife, one of her family friends, she’s 75 years old, she tried a skincare product. She tried it for two weeks and said, you know what? All my lines and wrinkles up are here. And I’m like, oh my God, you’re expecting so much from a skincare product, it’s not going to work that way. So I think people are so much more into skincare, and I think they’re starting earlier and they’re working in preventative things. I think if you’re thinking of two things to do for your skin, kind of universal things, retinol, I think in that family, everyone should consider using that. It’s proven in multiple studies to kind of turn over skin cells faster. Your skin’s going to look younger, your pigmentation will be more even, and you’ll just look overall better.
So a really strong retinol that doesn’t cause irritation is probably one thing that almost everyone should be on. And then the other thing that’s worth considering is growth factors. If you’re thinking about skincare and growth factors are things that are become much, much more hotter and you’re taking these actual stem cells and growth factors and you’re putting them on your face every day. And again, if you ever look, and again, I have an 11-year-old son, if I look at his skin, oh my God, it looks amazing. And so you’re like, I wish I could take some of this stuff from him and put it on me. Well, they’re already doing that in a lab and you’re able to grab these stem cells, even fetal things, and they do it in a safe way from patients. And when they have that, you can really see a difference. And again, you’re seeing patients now who were back in the eighties, someone who is 35 might look old, now they’re looking 70, and they’re like, you can’t tell how old they are. So it’s a game changer to have these new technologies.
Isis Richardson:
Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing information about new technology because it’s the fountain of youth that every single person that follows me is looking for from face all the way down to feet. And so that’s my demographic of women that are engaging in cosmetic enhancement surgery every single day. And so being able to be here for seven and a half going on eight years is so rewarding to sit down with doctors like you in your busy schedule to be able to give us some of the tips. My last question for you, doctor, is if a woman starts Botox, how much is she going to shave off in terms of age wrinkles? Can you talk to that?
Dr. Shah:
Oh, so if they have Botox, how much can they shave off age? So it really depends because for example, a lot of women, they may not need it, but if someone comes in with lines and wrinkles and how much in years, I don’t know. For me that’s kind of a hard term. I’m going to change the question. So I’m going to make it Botox and fillers and lasers. So if you do those things, if you do Botox fillers, laser skincare, nonsurgical things, you can look so much better, so much healthier, so much more receptive to your audience. And so they did a study and they actually looked at patient’s mood after 20 units of Botox, which really isn’t that much. 85% were happier in two weeks. They were clinically depressed and they no longer were depressed. To me, that was like, okay, so if you’re doing lots of these things to help your skin, your skin’s more vibrant, it looks more uniform, you’re seeing less lines, less wrinkles, you’re seeing volume in different places. So again, these are non-surgical techniques, but you can kind of take someone who’s a tired older looking 55 something 57, and maybe turn them into maybe a more of a vibrant late forties type of person and surgery. You can kind of go exponential on that.
Isis Richardson:
Well, doctor, I’m definitely going to be in touch with you because we are in the process of filming our reality TV show. It’s going to be in Miami, and we definitely going to have a lot of women who, and it happens on the platform that need it, that don’t need it, that are struggling with body dysmorphia, and we need a facial expert that’s going to be on their end. Even though I’m 32, I am trying to shave off some years and look like 27, 28, and I know that you’ll be able to help me do that..
Dr. Shah:
I’m looking at the camera. I see you look like you’re about 17, 18, so I have no idea.
Isis Richardson:
Bless your heart. Doctor, is there anything that we want to share with the silhouette and where can they find you on social media? We’re definitely going to be sharing some of your stuff. So this way our followers, we have women from all over the world, Chicago, Miami. So you’ll definitely be getting a lot of our followers.
Dr. Shah:
Amazing. What an amazing platform for silhouette. So I think the idea with this is my Instagram is probably a great way to connect, and that’s @shahaesthetics. So it’s SHAH aesthetics, A-E-S-T-H-E-T-I-C-S. And that’s on Instagram. A great way to connect and amazing.
Isis Richardson:
Okay, doctor, thank you so much and thank you for doing this. You’re definitely going to have the silhouettes. They love to find out about new doctors, new procedures, new techniques. So thank you so much for everything and we look forward to reaching out to you. We are officially in pre-production, so we definitely look forward to seeing.
Dr. Shah:
Love that Isis. So happy weekend and oh my God, that necklace, I’m going to ask you afterwards where you got that, because that is the, oh my God, out of this world.
Isis Richardson:
So my son’s godmother got it for me for a Christmas present with a matching earring.
Dr. Shah:
So that’s a one of a kind. So it’s like no one has that, but you okay, you win. Okay, awesome. Happy holidays.
Isis Richardson:
Okay, thank you, doctor. Happy holidays. Have an amazing day.
Dr. Shah:
You too, thanks. Okay, bye bye-Bye.
