Nearly every filler before and after was taken from straight on, and straight on happens to be the one angle where good filler work hides best. So before you judge the face in any of those photographs, it's worth a moment on where the camera was standing.
Why filler changes vanish in a straight-on photograph
Try this before you read any further. Look straight into your phone and take one picture, then turn your face about halfway toward the nearest window and take another. Put the two side by side. The second one has cheekbones in it, the first one has a good deal less of everything, and absolutely nothing happened to your face in between.
Here's why that is. Dermal fillers restore lost volume and sculpt the structure of your face, and structure is a three-dimensional business: how far something comes forward, where it stops, how the light travels across it. A photograph only has two dimensions to work with, so it has to give one of them up, and the one it gives up is depth.
Picture a three-layer cake on a stand. From the side you can count the layers, see how tall it stands, watch the cream sitting between them. Now climb on a chair and take the same cake from directly above, and you have a circle with icing on it. Nobody ate anything in between. The cake gave up nothing at all; the camera simply stopped recording the one direction the cake was interesting in.
Faces are like that, and the direction a face is interesting in is forwards. A cheekbone comes forward. A chin comes forward. A tear trough is a small dip going the other way. Every one of those is a measurement taken along the line running straight out of the picture, and that is precisely the line a photograph cannot keep.
And here's the ordinary reason nearly every picture misses it, which has nothing to do with anybody being sly. We photograph each other from the front. That is simply how it's done: passports, the group shot at a wedding, the phone held out at arm's length. Hardly anyone has ever asked a friend to stand side-on for a picture. So the angle that shows the structure of a face best is the one angle hardly anybody's camera has ever stood at.
What an immediately-after photograph is really showing you
Anyone who has painted a room knows this feeling. You stand back with the roller still in your hand, look at the wall, and the colour isn't the one on the tin. Wet paint reads deeper and richer than the paint you're actually going to live with, so what you're looking at is a wall in the middle of becoming something. Come back in the morning and the colour has arrived.
A photograph taken as you stand up from the chair is a wall with wet paint on it.
Now, the change itself is real and it's there straight away, and that's one of the genuinely lovely things about filler: you see it immediately, because a gel placed under the skin holds a shape up the second it goes in. There's no waiting around for anything to start working. What sits alongside that change for a while is everything else that comes of having just been treated. We say the rest of it plainly on the chin augmentation page: the final shape settles within two to three weeks as any swelling goes down, and restricted activities are advised for the first forty-eight hours. Lips do the same, their final shape settling as any initial swelling goes down, so the photograph you take in the car park is a picture of a lip still arriving.
None of which you have to time on your own, by the way. Treatment generally takes around thirty minutes, and aftercare gets talked through with you before you leave, so you go home knowing what your own face is doing and roughly when.
So a picture taken in the room, or that evening, or the next morning, is two things at once, and both of them are true: a truthful record of a real moment, and a poor record of a result. If you're taking your own, and plenty of sensible people do, take the pair you actually intend to compare a few weeks apart.
How lighting and angle do filler's job for free
Ask a decorator how they check a wall they've just filled and you'll get the same answer every time: hold a lamp flat against it and look along the surface. Light coming from the side skims across the surface, so anything that dips holds a small shadow and anything standing proud catches a small highlight. Faults you could not see from the doorway start announcing themselves one after another. Turn that lamp to face the wall square on and every one of them disappears, because light arriving straight at a surface fills the dips instead of grazing them.
Your face works exactly the same way. A window off to one side hands you cheekbones for nothing. A light directly in front of you takes them away again for nothing. And a bathroom downlight, coming at you from above, drops a shadow into every hollow on your face, which is the whole reason that particular mirror has upset so many people over the years.
Angle plays the same trick. Everyone has walked into a kitchen that had looked twice the size in the estate agent's photographs, and nobody standing in that kitchen blames the kitchen. The room was always this room. The picture was taken from the corner, in the best hour of the afternoon, with the blind up, and it was answering a completely different question from the one you were asking.
The part worth holding on to is that a camera does this in both directions. It can hand a face a result nobody placed. It can just as readily lose genuinely beautiful work under a flat light and a square-on angle, which happens constantly and is nobody's fault whatsoever.
That gives you something to do with any pair you find yourself looking at, and it takes about four seconds. Cover the faces and compare everything else: where the light is coming from, the angle of the head, the tilt of the chin, the distance from the lens, whether the mouth is resting or halfway into a smile, the make-up. If all of that matches between the two frames, then the only thing left that can possibly differ is the face, which is the one thing the pair was supposed to show you. If it doesn't match, the camera moved too, and when two things change at once a picture can't tell you which of them you're looking at. It may be a perfectly honest picture. It just isn't telling you anything about filler.
What an honest cheek, chin or tear trough before and after would show
Cheek first, because nothing shows this more plainly. Cheek filler puts height back into the middle of the face, and height is the one measurement a straight-on picture cannot hold, so an honest cheek filler before and after is shot in half-profile, the face turned roughly forty-five degrees, with the light coming from the same side in both frames. Photograph it square on and the very thing that changed is pointing directly at the lens. If you'd like the whole story of why so much of this starts higher up than people expect, why facial ageing starts higher than you think is the piece for it.
Chin is simpler still, because a chin lives in profile. Chin filler adjusts the size and shape of a chin, and what that really changes is a relationship: how the nose, the lips and the chin sit against one another along one line. From the side you can read that line in a second. From the front the three of them are stacked one behind another, so the distances between them are precisely what the camera has thrown away. A chin filler before and after shot face-on is a photograph of the wrong view.
Tear trough is the interesting one, because there the complaint itself is a shadow. The groove under your eye casts it, and the darkness you're seeing is a shape rather than a colour, which we've written out properly in why you look tired when you're not. So an honest tear trough filler before and after is the unkind one: the same unforgiving overhead light in both pictures, and the chin held at the same height in both. Soften that light in the second frame, or tip the face up toward a window, and the shadow lightens without anybody going near the groove. That's a photograph of a lamp.
And while we're on the subject, the folds around your mouth want a resting face in both frames, because the line worth photographing is the one that stays put when you stop making any expression at all. Half a smile in the second picture changes that fold entirely, and smile lines and marionette lines covers which of those lines we'd soften and which we'd happily leave alone.
The only before that tells you anything about your face
Which brings us to the awkward bit, and it's the most honest thing on this page.
Even the most careful pair of photographs, matched in every single way we've just been through, is a fact about somebody else's face. It tells you what happened when volume was restored to their cheek, on their bone structure, with their skin lying over it. Yours is a different face carrying a different history, and no amount of careful photography closes that gap.
The good news is that the before you actually need is walking around with you today, and it can do something no photograph can. It turns. It tilts toward a window and away from one. It can be seen in profile, in half-profile and straight on, all inside the same minute. A photograph had one go, and it can't be asked a single thing more.
That's most of what a consultation is for. We look properly at where volume has genuinely gone, tell you plainly what putting it back would change for the things bothering you, and tell you just as plainly what it wouldn't. For a non-surgical nose job we may take photographs at that appointment to help plan the treatment precisely, and that's photography doing a thoroughly useful job: planning, rather than persuading.
There is one thing a photograph of somebody else is genuinely brilliant for, mind you, and we'd encourage it. Bring the one sitting on your phone. It tells us what you like far better than the name of a treatment ever could, and we've written about exactly that in what people actually mean when they ask for Russian lips. What it can't do is tell you what your own face would look like, and those two jobs get muddled up constantly.
Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided. If you've never sat through one of these appointments before, what actually happens at a consultation takes the mystery out of a first visit.
Come and be looked at from more than one angle
If you've spent the last few minutes turning your head at your phone, you already know what you'd like to ask. Arrange your consultation and we'll do the looking in person, from the angles a change would actually show in, and tell you honestly what filler would and wouldn't do for you. If filler isn't the answer for the thing that's been bothering you, we'd far rather say so on the day than have you find out later, and you'll leave knowing what would work instead.
A photograph only ever gets one angle. You're bringing the whole face, which is a great deal more to work with.