Surgical · midface
Cheek (malar) implants
A solid implant seated on the cheekbone to add projection where the midface reads flat. Permanent, and reversible only by another operation.
Not medical advice. This page explains what a procedure is and what is known about it. It is not a recommendation, and it says nothing about whether you are a candidate for anything. Only a licensed provider who has examined you can tell you that.
What it maps to in LooksRatio
- Cheekbone flarehow far the cheekbones project laterally relative to the rest of the midface
What it is
A preformed implant, usually silicone or porous polyethylene, placed directly on the malar bone. Malar implants sit over the cheekbone proper and add lateral projection. Submalar implants sit below it and fill hollowing rather than adding width. The two answer different complaints and are often confused.
How it works
Access is normally intraoral, through an incision above the upper teeth, or occasionally through a lower eyelid incision. A pocket is made on the bone, the implant is seated in it, and in most modern practice it is fixed with a screw so it cannot migrate.
The implant sits on bone, under the soft tissue. It changes the shape the soft tissue drapes over, which is why the result reads as skeletal rather than as volume.
Recovery
Visible swelling for one to two weeks, a soft diet for the first days when the approach is intraoral, and a final contour over two to three months.
Risks and what actually goes wrong
Infection is the one that ends with the implant coming out. Malar implants have been reported with post-implantation infection rates around 2.67%, and silicone showed higher infection and displacement rates than some other materials. Displacement occurs in roughly 1% to 5% of cases even in experienced hands and needs surgical repositioning.
A comparative study of malar implants against fat transfer found complications in 3.8% of the implant group and none in the fat group, with two infections requiring washout and removal, but reported higher patient satisfaction in the implant group. A 2025 systematic review put the overall complication rate across facial implant studies at 4.4%.
Lower-commitment alternatives
Fat grafting moves your own fat to the cheek. No foreign material and no infection risk of that kind, but 40% to 60% of the graft is reabsorbed and multiple sessions are common. It is generally the better answer for a small correction and the worse one for a large, sharply defined change.
Filler does the same thing temporarily and is the cheapest way to see whether you actually like more midface projection before making it permanent.
What LooksRatio assumes
The projection moves cheekbone flare 80% of the way to its ideal, and assumes an implant that stays where it was put. Fat grafting will not reliably reach that figure in one session.