F

Fasciitis (necrotising)	Inflammation in the fascia, commonly known as flesh-eating disease. It is a severe disease of sudden onset that spreads rapidly.  Symptoms include red or purple skin in the affected area, severe pain, and fever. The most commonly affected areas are the limbs and perineum.
Fibroma	Benign connective tissue nodule in the skin.
Fillers	A substance (often hyaluronic acid), which is injected into the skin for increased fullness and aesthetically rejuvenating expression.
First-degree burn	A burn to the skin that only involves the epidermis. Flushing is visible as with a sunburn (erythema), but no bullae are seen. Link: https://plastsurgeon.com/burns-treatment/assessment-of-burn-degrees/
Flamazine	A cream containing silver sulfadiazine that acts antibacterial. It is often used in conjunction with burns.  Link: https://plastsurgeon.com/burns-treatment/procedures/procedure-applying-bandages/
Flap surgery	The surgical technique used to reposition the patient’s skin, muscle or fat from one place to another, to reconstruct a defect. Used when there is an insufficient amount of tissue for direct suturing. Flaps can be classified based on several characteristics including how the flap is manipulated (e.g. Transposition flap), its blood supply (e.g. Deep inferior epigastric perforator flap) or which tissue components (e.g. skin/muscle/cartilage) it contains.
Fleur de Lis operation	A type of abdominal plastic with a vertical incision in the midline of the abdomen extending up to the processus xiphoideus. It is named after the French lily with its three leaves. Used in cases where the loose skin extends upwards the abdomen above/around the navel and where looseness is seen in several planes.
Folliculitis	Inflammation in a hair follicle.
Forehead flap	Flap used for nasal reconstruction. A longitudinal stalked flap is raised from the forehead and brought down to a defect on the nose where it is stitched. Once the blood supply is secured, the stalk will be cut and sutured after a few weeks.
Free skin flap	“Free” implies that tissue is detached with the blood supply from a donor site of the body and moved to a recipient site to and then circulation is re-established by anastomosis. It can consist of skin, muscle, bone and well-defined vessels. Using microsurgery, small blood vessels less than 1 mm in diameter can be anastomosed, allowing the movement of larger tissue areas. This is in contrast to a “pedicled” flap where the tissue is supplied with blood from the same site as prior, where the flap is party attached to the donor site.
Frozen section guided excision	A technique that can be used peri-operatively to ensure that a tumor is radically removed. The removed tumor is rapidly frozen to -20-30 degrees Celsius, allowing 5-10 micrometer thin slices to be cut and examined under a microscope. In this way, a pathologist can decide within 1-2 hours microscopically whether there are free resection edges.Used to secure free edges before reconstruction with a local skin flap of the face or in breast surgery for breast cancer.The technique is far faster than a standard histological examination where the tissue is casted in paraffin, stained and microscoped (takes 1-2 weeks). However, the technique is not quite as secure as the standard.
Full-thickness skin graft	A skin graft that includes both epidermis and dermis. Often harvested from the inside of the upper arm, at the clavicle or in front of the ear to achieve the same color as the defective face.