Prominent chin: how to treat an overly protruding chin?

The chin, located under the mouth is actually a bony protuberance. Depending on the person, the chin is more or less pronounced. Some people may have a lack of chin while in others it might be too prominent.

A prominent chin, also called a protruding chin, is a chin that is protruding forward. It has a prominence of soft tissue or mandibular bone. This characteristic feature can sometimes lead to a number of difficulties and in some cases, people with a prominent chin resort to cosmetic surgery.

There is no medical treatment for a protruding chin so surgery offers tailored solutions that allow the chin to be pushed back and show excellent results.

Prominent chin: what are the causes?

In about 2% of cases, progenia is hereditary. Very often, this is a family trait with several members of the same family having a more advanced lower jaw. This was the case, for example with the Habsburg dynasty, a family that possessed this particular trait.

However, a protruding chin is caused in most cases by a functional problem. Indeed, this malformation may be associated with insufficient development of the upper jaw thus the jawbone, narrower than the mandible, blocks the growth of the chin. To compensate, the lower jaw then tends to move forward and the palate eventually atrophies.

Over the years, as a result the chin tends to move forward more and more, accentuating the malformation hence the need to resort to cosmetic surgery to alleviate this problem, which can become a real health problem by impeding the breathing in some cases.

Prominent chin: how to fix it?

In order to restore facial balance and push the chin back, some patients are no longer shy about resorting to cosmetic surgery. In aesthetic medicine, there is no way to correct a protruding chin besides surgery. A genioplasty makes it possible to move the chin back in two different ways:

• By drilling through the lower part of the jawline.
• By jaw fracture surgery: the excess bone slice is fractured and fixed to the anterior part of the chin to maintain facial harmony.

A genioplasty is the most appropriate treatment for a prominent chin. The technique to be employed depends on the doctor but also on the extent of the protruding chin.