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What’s All the Hype About Microcannulas?

If you are an experienced aesthetic practitioner, microcannulas live up to the hype for several reasons. We teach cannula techniques in our master’s level courses. Cannulas are one great tool that can be part of an experienced aesthetic practitioners toolbox for several reasons:

Safety – You can easily aspirate if you fear you’ve hit a blood vessel.
Less entry points – You don’t need to pierce the skin as often, which means you can get more done through each injection site to achieve better results.
Less trauma – Since you are pushing through tissue instead of piercing it, there is often reduced swelling and bruising.
Less discomfort – Since you are pushing instead of piercing, patients report less overall discomfort with the procedure.

Certain cannulas won’t be suitable in every situation, so you should match the cannula to the area being treated. Finer gauge cannulas provide more flexibility, but the flexibility makes it harder to advance through tissue. For example, we find that the Dermasculpt 27 gauge-one inch cannula can be a workhorse providing broad-brush strokes. A 30 gauge-one inch cannula can work in finer areas. You might consider a variety of cannula gauges for the following regions:

  • tear troughs/infraorbital region
  • lower face (where there tends to be more bruising): oral commissures, peri-mental and pre-jowl sulcus regions
  • preauricular and malar regions

While we really like using cannulas as part of our aesthetic toolbox, there are situations where they might not be appropriate. Use can depend on the patient. Sometimes a patient’s tissue might be hard to advance the cannula through or it might not give them the results they are trying to achieve. For example, cannulas can be difficult to use if you are treating finer lines or when doing lip shaping.  While it’s certainly possible to use a cannula, you might not be able to create the desired curves or get more superficial in the skin.

There is definitely a learning curve with cannulas, but for experienced aesthetic practitioners, they are valuable tools. Check out our master’s level courses for more information.