Radiesse Before and After: What Results Look Like

Cheek augmentation is not one of Radiesse's FDA-approved uses.

The approved list covers moderate to severe facial wrinkles and folds such as the nasolabial folds, facial fat loss in people with HIV, volume loss in the back of the hands, jawline contour for Radiesse (+), and décolleté wrinkles when the product is diluted 1:2 with saline.

Cheeks are not on that list, so a cheek before-and-after you see online is off-label use.

The Radiesse guide walks through the approved areas and the rest of the label area by area.

What the maker says happens in treated skin: Merz describes immediate volume correction, followed by collagen and elastin stimulation over time.

The material itself is an injectable implant whose main component is synthetic calcium hydroxylapatite (CaHA) — particles of 25–45 microns in the 1.5 mL syringe, suspended in a gel carrier of sterile water, glycerin and sodium carboxymethylcellulose.

The area just below matters too.

The label states that Radiesse's safety and effectiveness in the periorbital (eye) area have not been established, and Radiesse is not among the four fillers that hold an FDA-approved under-eye indication, so under-eye use is off-label as well.

The jawline is an approved area.

On 2021-09-01, FDA approved Radiesse (+), the version with lidocaine, for deep (subdermal and/or supraperiosteal) injection to improve moderate to severe loss of jawline contour in adults over 21 — making it and Juvéderm Volux XC the two US fillers with an FDA-approved jawline indication as of October 2026.

The on-label before-and-after, then, is improvement of that contour loss in adults over 21, injected deep beneath the skin (subdermally) or over the jawbone (supraperiosteally).

Afterward, Merz lists bruising, redness, swelling, pain and itching among the local side effects reported with Radiesse (+) in the face, and difficulty chewing appeared in face studies.

On duration, Merz says Radiesse results have been shown to last up to 2 years — a manufacturer figure — while the label's own safety information says it is not known whether Radiesse is safe or effective beyond 3 years in the face.

Neck and chest are two different stories.

The décolleté, meaning the chest, became an approved Radiesse area in March 2026 — but only in one specific form: Radiesse diluted 1:2 with 0.9% sterile saline, injected subdermally with a 22-gauge flexible cannula, for décolleté wrinkles in patients 22 and older.

The neck itself remains off-label.

Merz describes what the diluted form is for: mixed with a higher volume of saline so it can be spread more thinly over larger areas, used specifically for the décolleté to address fine lines and crepey texture.

In the pivotal study behind the approval, 152 subjects at 9 US sites received treatments of 1.5 mL Radiesse diluted with 3.0 mL saline, given on day 1, week 6 and week 12, with an optional retreatment at week 36.

Measured results: 71.2% of treated subjects were responders at week 24, against 6.3% of untreated controls, and 60.7% of treated subjects were still responders at 60 weeks.

Those are the study's group percentages, not a prediction for any one chest.

The neck is where the off-label line is clearest.

The 2018 global consensus guidelines on diluted and hyperdiluted CaHA described its use for skin laxity in the mid/lower face, neck, décolletage, upper arms, abdomen, upper legs and buttocks, listed bruising, swelling, mild pain and induration as adverse events, and called it a "novel off-label use" in the authors' own words.

One imaging footnote: Radiesse's particles are radiopaque and show on X-rays and CT scans, so patients should tell providers and radiologists — and in the décolleté study's imaging sub-study, no diluted Radiesse was seen on mammograms or breast ultrasound.

The back of the hands has been an approved area since 2015-06-04, when the indication for hand augmentation to correct volume loss in the dorsum of the hands joined the same PMA as the facial uses.

What Merz lists as reported with hand use: bruising, redness, swelling, pain, itching, nodules or bumps/lumps, difficulty performing activities and loss of sensation — and it says nodules or lumps in the back of the hand can last up to 1 year.

The studied window is shorter than the face's, too: the label's safety information says it is not known whether Radiesse is safe or effective beyond 1 year in the hand.