Fat Graftingin Seoul: Your Own Fat for Facial Hollows

Facial volume fades with age, weight loss or simply the way a face is built, and the result is shadow: a sunken lid, a flat forehead, a cheek that drops in at the side. Fat grafting replaces that lost volume with living tissue from your own body, so the material is soft and has no product to reject. The trade-off is predictability, since only part of the injected fat establishes a blood supply and stays.

A graft adds volume and nothing else. It does not lift skin that has slid down, and it cannot flatten a bag of fat that pushes forward under the eye. Those patterns call for other operations, and a graft can be combined with them when hollows sit next to sagging.

Under eye fat grafting and other target areas

The price list separates the full face from the upper eyelid, which is grafted in finer amounts. Under the eye, a graft fills a tear trough that is hollow without a bulge above it. When a bulge does sit above the groove, the fat already in the lower lid can be moved instead, which is a separate operation called under-eye fat repositioning.

The operation has two sites. At the donor site, fat is drawn out through a small opening with a thin cannula. For a full-face graft the abdomen or thigh is used; for a small graft such as the upper eyelid the clinic takes fat from the groin or armpit, with the groin used in most of these cases. The clinic notes that the harvest site does not get in the way of walking or ordinary daily activity afterward.

Fat cells survive a graft only if new blood vessels grow into them, so the fat is processed to separate it from fluid and blood and then placed in many thin threads at different depths, never as one lump. Each small deposit sits close to tissue with a blood supply. In a meta-analysis of studies that measured facial grafts objectively, average volume retention was 47%, and retention could not be predicted for an individual (Lv, 2020). The clinic's own guidance is that 50–70% of the graft takes, varying from person to person and not guaranteed, and the part that takes is long-lasting.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP), prepared from your own blood, can be added to the graft as a separate line on the price list. This page makes no claim that it raises the amount of fat that survives.

The surgery fee depends on the area: the full face and the upper eyelid are listed as separate operations. IV sedation is charged as its own line on top, as it is for every surgery at the clinic, and PRP is an optional add-on. If a second graft is planned months later, its price depends on whether fat stored from the first operation is used or a new harvest is needed. All of these figures are before VAT, which adds 10% at payment.

Ask for a written quote that lists the graft, sedation and any PRP line together before you book travel, so the full total for your area is clear in advance.

Some loss of volume is part of every graft, and it is uneven: in a systematic review, facial graft survival ranged from 30% to 83% between studies with no standard way of measuring it (Yu, 2015). Small lumps and contour changes are the more frequent problems; a fat embolism is rare but severe.

• Volume loss over the first months that leaves less fullness than planned, or more on one side than the other.
• Lumps, firm nodules or small oil cysts where fat did not survive, which can need treatment.
• Overcorrection, especially in thin eyelid skin, that shows as a visible bump.
• Bruising and swelling on the face and at the harvest site, plus a small scar where fat was drawn out.
• Infection at the grafted or harvest site.
• Fat entering a blood vessel (fat embolism), which can cause vision loss or stroke.

The last risk is the reason injection technique matters. A review of 98 reports of vision change after facial injections found autologous fat to be the most frequent material, at 47.9%, ahead of hyaluronic acid, with the area between the brows, the nose, the nasolabial folds and the forehead at highest risk (Beleznay, 2015). For eyelid grafts in particular, a review of 16 studies reported satisfactory results and few complications but called the evidence weak because methods differed so widely (Boureaux, 2016). Sudden eye pain, blurred vision, weakness or slurred speech after surgery needs emergency care at once.