Hollow Temples & Temple VolumeNewstead, Brisbane

Your temple is the soft area on the side of your head, between the eye and the ear. It sits over a shallow, bowl-shaped dip in the skull called the temporal fossa, with a curved bony ridge above it called the temporal crest. Under the skin, several layers sit stacked together: fat near the surface, then a thin sheet of tissue called fascia, then a deeper fat cushion (the temporal fat pad) that keeps the side of the face looking smooth, then the temporalis (one of your chewing muscles, which fans out across the side of the head), and finally the temporal bone underneath. When we assess a hollow temple, we're really working out which of these layers has thinned. It matters, because the temple flows straight into the outer brow, the under-eye area, and the upper cheek. When the temple is full, the upper face looks smooth from the side. When it sinks, the outer brow can look like it's dropping and the eye socket can look larger, even though neither has actually changed.

Hollow temples usually come from one of two things. The first is simply how you're built. The shape of the temporal bone, the bulk of the chewing muscle, and the natural fullness of the temple fat pads vary a lot from person to person. If you sit at the slimmer end of that range, your temples may have always looked a little hollow. People describe it in everyday ways: temples that have always been sunken, a head that narrows above the cheekbones, or a slightly gaunt, tired look across the sides of the face even after a good night's sleep. The medical name for this natural pattern is bilateral temporal concavity, which just means temples that sit a bit deeper than average on both sides.

The second is change over time. From your late twenties, the bone behind the temple slowly starts to thin, so the support underneath gradually reduces. This happens slowly, and usually shows more in your later years. The chewing muscle thins, and the fat pad changes in an uneven way: the upper part shrinks while the lower part can fill out. That's why older temples often look scalloped rather than smoothly flat. The fat just under the skin reduces too, and the skin itself gets thinner. Big or fast weight loss speeds all of this up, and that includes the rapid weight loss many people have on weight-loss medications, where the temples are often one of the first places to hollow. This usually sits alongside broader facial volume loss in the upper face.

Hollow temples turn up at different ages for men and women. Men usually start with more muscle and thicker tissue here, so it tends to show later. But men who are naturally lean, or who lose a lot of weight, can hollow earlier, with the head narrowing sharply above the cheekbones. Women often have more soft fat in the temples to begin with, but tend to lose it more visibly around menopause, when lower oestrogen thins the skin's support and facial fat shifts around. The way the brow settles afterwards differs too: flatter and more set back on a man's face, softer and lower on a woman's. Because the same change can look so different from one face to the next, a good assessment looks at you on your own, not against a formula.

Our Newstead clinic serves clients across Brisbane, including New Farm, Teneriffe, Fortitude Valley, Hamilton, Ascot, and the broader inner north.