BBeyond Magazine

The Eyes Have it...

Profile of a unique plastic surgeon, Jesper Sorensen.

Doctor Sorensen does not grace the pages of popular culture magazines, nor does his reception room carry stacks of them. Nor, for that matter, does it have the prerequisite albums of before-and-after patients’ faces...

His is a low-key, modern Scandinavian style practice located in a beautiful Victorian building in Kensington, London SW5.

Yet, some of the world’s most glamorous men and women beat a discreet path to this particular medical destination.

Sorensen is a microsurgeon, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon and a scientist. Above all, he insists, he is also a physician and a craftsman. He does not share the artistic pretensions of some of his more notorious peers, nor does he have a signature procedure that he claims as his own.

Rather, he utilises and further develops a wide range of components from the best procedures in the field today and adapts them to the individual patient’s needs - offering a truly bespoke treatment. His natural-looking results are his signature.

There is no huge ego to the man and he likes to emphasise that the best results, from a patient’s point of view, are the collective results of documented scientific and surgical achievements.

I have contacted him to discuss very specifically the re-volumising of the face through fat grafting.

This is a technically simple and old procedure (first described in 1893), he tells me, although its modern application in plastic surgery is relatively recent. Extensively documented and popularised by Dr Sydney Coleman in New York, it consists of re-shaping and rejuvenating the facial contours through grafting small amounts of the patient’s own fat where it has atrophied (lost through ageing or disease).

This three-dimensional approach to face rejuvenation restores the fullness associated with youthful contours, rather than just lift and stretch.

Nowhere is the difference more visible than in the eye area.

If you’ve had blepharoplasty more than 6-7 years ago, the procedure would probably have consisted of removing a portion of the lax muscle that contains the structural fat in the eye socket and crucially, removing some of that fat, which may result in patients developing a hollow look with further ageing.

Sorensen uses a plication technique which consists of folding the tiny orbital muscle, strengthening and repairing it (rather than excising), which results in re-positioning the sagging fat pockets. By grafting small amounts of fat harvested from the patient, he then smoothes out the area around the eye. The results are nothing short of remarkable.

Sorensen has developed his own range of special high-precision instruments for his surgeries. Cannulas used by him are so thin, they allow the micro-grafting of minute amounts of fat, thereby improving vastly the survival chance of the new cells.

A collateral benefit of fat grafting is the overall improvement of the skin, properties which are attributed to the fat’s high stem cell content and its ability to form new blood vessels.

The full text of the Sorensen interview, with graphics explaining his approach, will be published in the next book in the Beyond Black hard cover series, Defy Age.

www.bbeyondmagazine.com