Removing a scar/ mole from the chin.

This patient is the same person with the stubborn blackhead/keratin plug extractions on the nose, just recently posted.
THIS is the reason that she came to see me in the first place. She has had a mole on her chin, that was treated with a laser many years ago. She doesn’t like the appearance of it and so she came to me to see if it was possible to remove the mole.
Actually, she no longer has a mole there, but there is mainly a scar left from the laser treatment, and this scar is firm and raised.
Dermatologists in general, do not recommend mole removal using laser. This does not remove the mole completely, and distorts it, so that if it were to turn cancerous, it is very difficult to detect cancerous changes, or even, that it may mistakenly be read as cancer because the laser treatment has distorted the appearance of the mole.
If a mole needs to be removed because it is suspicious, or if a patient requests removal because they don’t like the appearance, the mole should be removed entirely, either by an excision (as you see here), or a shave removal (using a blade to “shave” the entire lesion off).
In this patient’s case, I needed to do an excision instead of a shave removal because I knew the scar was deep, under the surface of the skin. If I had done a shave removal, there would have been a gouge/ deep scar in the skin. At least with an excision, we can try to keep a thin small linear scar line as a replacement for the scar/mole that was present.
Local anesthesia was placed, and you can see that I marked out two different surgical options in the beginning, showing different directions of closure, and I chose to direct the scar line to keep the excision line to a minimum. The tissue excised was sent for pathology to confirm the presence of a partially treated benign mole and scar.
She did great, and my goal is always to create a scar that the patient herself may always know is there, but that others will never notice.
Thank you for watching!

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