Changing lives forever through Operation Smile

MANILA, Philippines - Not many can say that they have changed lives for the better. Not many can claim that a life was lived well in constant service to another.

In the 30 years that Operation Smile has been working, it has given smiles to over 24,000 surgeries in the Philippines, which is where the operation began. Now, it has given smiles to and changed forever the lives of over 200,000 children and young adults — a feat that surely not anybody can catch up to any time soon.

The impact that a facial deformity has on a child is not merely physical. Every day, children with facial deformities look at themselves and question why they are different. On top of that emotional and psychological trauma, children with facial deformities usually suffer from respiratory ailments and ear infections.

Society can be hard to children with cleft palates and lips. They are taunted and teased for not having that same smile as everyone else.

In the Philippines, one in every 500 babies born every year has a cleft lip, palate or both. This means that roughly 4,004 Filipinos out of 2,064 million born every year have this deformity.

A report from the Philippine Birth Defect Registry — a partnership of the Department of Health and the US National Institute of Health’s Institute of Human Genetics — said cleft lip and palates are among the top 12 birth defects in the country.

An act that picks up from 30 years of constant doing, Operation Smile is at it again. On the event of its 30th anniversary, it changed the lives of more children — this time in partnership with an expert in healing scars, Dermatix.

Scars are different among people. The body has different ways of dealing with wounds but unlike most misconceptions that scars are irreparable, scars can be healed forever with the help of effective skin products imbued with innovative technologies and skin-savvy ingredients. Dermatix is just that.

Dermatix is a formula specifically made to promote better scar healing. It is made with the innovative CPX (cyclopentasiloxane) technology for better flattening and softening of scars and vitamin C for photoprotection and skin lightening.

Dermatix and Operation Smile, a partnership that surely must be meant to be, will be healing scars of children who have cleft palates, lip palates, and other facial deformities that prevent them from living life as normally and as fully as they should. 

This partnership’s goal is to give children a better shot in life without living with a permanent mark of pain and imperfection on their faces.

Children who are scarred for being different have the opportunity now to live life without the burden of an imperfect smile. Dermatix and Operation Smile are not only fixing smiles, they are changing lives forever.