Wide scars

Healing ability after surgery is a somehow unpredictable biological phenomenon with extreme variability between ethnicities, individuals, skin quality of different anatomical areas, features of the surgical technique and multiple genetical and mechanical factors; there are well known factors leading to a unfavorable aesthetic outcomes, including but not limited to black skin, sebaceous or oily skin, certain areas like back, shoulders, chest, mandibular angle and earlobe, abdomen, etc, causes by mechanical stress and pull from the wound edges like hematoma, seroma, excessive postoperative swelling or inflammation, poor surgical planning, features inherent to the surgical technique, etc; notwithstanding some areas are prone to superb aesthetic quality of the scars, like the scalp, face, eyelids, ears, lips, nose, intraoral mucosa, areolas, etc.

A wide scar occurs when there is a weak collagen sealing a wound with or without excessive mechanical strain pulling from scar edges during a prolonged time, therefore leading to a flat, thin, initially red or pink but pale overtime patch of scarry tissue due to insufficient activity of the fibroblasts or highly specialized scar cells. Some associated symptoms can be initially redness, itch, hypersensitivity, pain, puckering, contraction, retraction, irregularities, etc.

Treatment is initially expectant, since there is no non invasive method of treatment; cases of unsightly width may experience benefit of late and scheduled surgical revision.