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January 27, 2026
Dr Tim Pearce
“I just want to look younger.”
This is probably one of the most common requests from patients who come to see a medical aesthetic clinician. But what does this mean, and what should you do?
In this blog, Dr Tim Pearce breaks down what it is that makes people look younger and shares some top tips to make it easier for you to consult your patients, so they understand exactly which treatments you are recommending, and why.
Do you feel anxious about causing complications? Many clinicians feel so overwhelmed with the thought of causing a vascular occlusion that it stops them growing their aesthetics business. Dr Tim is currently hosting a webinar series to help you overcome your fear of complications so that you can uplevel your knowledge, and increase your CPD-certified learning to build a successful aesthetics business. Sign up here >>
What makes a face look youthful?
To understand the meaning of a youthful face, Dr Tim finds it helpful to start by looking at children. Obviously, they are the youngest humans, and their face represents the ultimate potential of youth.
If you consider a baby’s face, they have smaller jaws, broader cheeks – proportionally to their faces, their eyes dominate, larger foreheads, smaller upturned noses, and relatively small chins that are still the lowest point of their face.
Looking at a child’s faces helps you to understand the origins of the face, but of course, your patients do not want to look like children. They are aiming to look like they did in their prime, but we can understand that better by considering where the face started and ultimately where it is going. The prime in someone’s life, depending on your perspective, is usually somewhere between 18 and 30 years old. This is often what both the patient and practitioner are trying to articulate when you set about designing a good treatment plan – you ask yourself how you can bring the patient back to that sweet spot, to their prime. Obviously, the intention is not to make them look too young, and conversely not to make them look older, both of which are easy to do with aesthetic intervention, depending on the patient.
Let’s explore the best treatments for restoring a sense of youthfulness.
Restoring youth with lip filler
One of the more powerful ways to make someone look fresher or younger is with lip volume.
Going back to basics and looking at the face of a young child, we often note considerable lip projection with a very dominant top lip and a short philtrum. This is not a look we want to create in adults, but it does help to note where the youthful lips begin.
The older lip is the exact opposite in an adult, with a very small, flat top lip often with a proportionately bigger lower lip, but very little definition. There is a lack of projection and the lips become relatively small on the face. These changes between young and older lips make lip filler treatments an easy way to improve the sense of youthfulness and attractiveness, particularly in females. Lips are much more important to female faces because they are part of what makes a face female and therefore should be more dominant in females, but less dominant in males. The goal is to bring the face into proportion.
Similarly, combination treatments enable you to correct smaller lines that occur around the lips to improve their overall aura – a negative expression is often associated with a pursed or small lip that makes the person appear angry. By relaxing that part of the mouth and treating the lip area using a combination of botulinum toxin and dermal filler, you also remove the lines and wrinkles, so the lips dominate and there are no distractions.
For more on restoring a good aura, read up on 10 negative expressions caused by facial ageing.
Restoring youth to the chin with chin augmentation
Restoring the chin is a more subtle way that you can make a patient look younger or fresher.
As the face ages, there is a competition between the lateral part of the face, the cheeks, and the chin. The cheeks tend to come downwards and out, or forwards, and the chin starts to rotate up. This is because your mentalis muscle has been constantly pulling upwards throughout life, resulting in a loss of definition in the chin as the jowls out compete it. The overall heart shape of the face, a characteristic of youth, becomes lost.
To help return the face to a more youthful state, you can use dermal fillers to augment and bring the chin slightly downwards, ensuring that it dominates the lower face once more. This treatment does not work for every patient depending on face shape and natural ageing patterns. If a patient has a long face, with a strong chin, it will tend to get stronger as they get older, dominating the face; thus, treatments need to be more focused on lateral volume.
Get further insight from Dr Tim on chin augmentation procedures:
- Chin anatomy and safe augmentation injection techniques
- How to avoid causing a vascular occlusion with chin fillers
Restoring temple volume loss with subtle dermal filler treatment
Temple volume loss is a very strong sign of ageing, but it is often a subconscious sign of ageing because people do not readily spot it in themselves or others. There are no lines or wrinkles, and it is not a feature that draws the eye like someone’s lips, nose, chin, or cheeks, meaning that volume loss to the temples is regularly overlooked. It is vital to carry out a thorough consultation with your patients to bring into focus the things that they do not consciously notice.
When describing the signs of ageing to a patient, you can explain that volume loss in the face can make them look skeletal. This tends to make sense to them and will resonate that it means they can see their skeleton in the shape of my face which was not apparent when they were younger.
Treating the temples with dermal filler to add volume is one of the easier ways to make someone look younger and fresher without anyone knowing they have had treatment. In some patients, it can also create a lateral pull of the eyebrow which is very restorative. A lateral lift of the eyebrow, even by a few millimetres can make an individual look much more alert.
Restoring the forehead with dermal fillers
A baby’s face is dominated by their forehead. As humans, we have large brains and small faces when we are born. The skull develops over time, but the relative dominance of the forehead is beautiful, particularly in reference to forehead projection in females. It should have a beautiful shape, without sloping backwards and be free of other complexity.
As ageing develops, volume is lost resulting in three different planes within the forehead, two lateral and one central. Using dermal filler for forehead restoration, you can restore the overall roundness and softness of the forehead curves so that it catches the light in a more youthful way. Learn more in forehead treatments: dermal fillers or Botox?
Using Botox to remove line and wrinkles and restore youthfulness
As well as using dermal fillers, aesthetic clinicians often turn to neurotoxins (botulinum toxin type A) to make a patient look fresher or younger. Using Botox® treatment, we can improve the ‘canvas’ of the face, says Dr Tim. By removing fine lines and wrinkles, you allow the eyes and lips to dominate.
When looking at the face of a baby, it is all about the eyes, everything on the face is framing the eyes. As we get older, complexity increases, meaning the eyes must compete with other features and with lines and wrinkles in the upper face; thus, we can use botulinum toxins to remove these distractions.
Treatment to make a patient look younger by softening lines and wrinkles with a small amount of botulinum toxin works best in patients around the age of 35, concludes Dr Tim. However, much older patients still get a beneficial result, but multiple modalities tend to work better than treatments in isolation.
For additional best practice advice on treating patients in medical aesthetics, read some more of Dr Tim’s blogs including justifying medical aesthetic treatment:
- Treating a patient with a medical aesthetic intervention
- How to say “no” to an aesthetic patient without making them angry
- How to manage patient expectations and avoid complaints like a Pro
You can also download Dr Tim’s frequently used filler volumes facial map to help guide your facial assessment and product use.
Dr Tim will be doing a show on YouTube very soon looking at treatments that can accidentally make patients look older, so keep your eyes peeled for that. He loves to hear from his followers, so why not drop him a comment or question on social media if you have anything to say about treatments that are most associated with looking younger or fresher; you can find Dr Tim Pearce on Instagram.
Botox® is a registered trademark of Allergan Aesthetics plc.
Aesthetics Mastery Show
Treatments that make you look younger.
Dr Tim says:
“If you or your patient just want to know which treatments help restore youth, I’m breaking down the top 5 aesthetic treatments that will help you achieve that goal and look ten years younger. “
Watch the full Aesthetics Mastery Show here.
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Fillers & BOTOX eLearning Courses
If you want to develop your understanding of aesthetic procedures, Dr Tim Pearce offers two highly rated foundation courses that introduce the key concepts and techniques:
Both give CPD and certificates on completion.
In addition, browse our FREE downloadable resources.
Dr Tim Pearce eLearning
Dr Tim Pearce MBChB BSc (Hons) MRCGP founded his eLearning concept in 2016 in order to provide readily accessible BOTOX® and dermal filler online courses for fellow Medical Aesthetics practitioners. His objective was to raise standards within the industry – a principle which remains just as relevant today.
Our exclusive video-led courses are designed to build confidence, knowledge and technique at every stage, working from foundation level to advanced treatments and management of complications.
Thousands of delegates have benefited from the courses and we’re highly rated on Trustpilot. For more information or to discuss which course is right for you, please get in touch with our friendly team.
