Some injuries are invisible. Facial injuries are not.

A scar on your face changes how the world sees you — and how you see yourself. It shows up in the mirror every morning. It’s there in photos of your kids’ birthday parties. It’s what people look at when they’re talking to you. For many accident survivors, visible facial injuries carry an emotional weight that goes well beyond the physical pain of the original wound.

Illinois law recognizes this. A claim for facial injuries and scarring is about more than medical bills. It’s about what this injury has taken from you — and what it may continue to take for the rest of your life.

If you’ve suffered a facial injury or permanent scarring because of someone else’s negligence in Illinois, here’s what you should understand about your legal case.

How Facial Injuries Happen

Facial injuries in personal injury cases most often result from:

• Car and bike accidents:  The face is extremely vulnerable in a collision. Airbag deployment, contact with the steering wheel, dashboard, or shattered glass, and the force of a side or front impact can all cause serious facial trauma.
• Slip and fall accidents: A fall onto a hard surface — concrete, tile, a broken stair— can fracture facial bones, split skin, and cause injuries that leave permanent marks.
• Workplace accidents: Machinery, chemicals, fire, and falling objects can all cause serious facial trauma in occupational settings.

The Types of Facial Injuries in Illinois Accident Cases

As with any other injuries, injuries to the face come in many forms and will be noted in your medical records. These are some of the more common ones:

• Lacerations are cuts to the skin. When they’re deep, wide, or located in areas of tension — around the mouth, near the eyes, across the forehead — they often leave permanent scars, even with excellent medical care. Other lacerations are on the surface and clear up without scarring. 
• Facial fractures include breaks to the nose, cheekbones, jaw, orbital socket (the bone around the eye), and the forehead. These injuries often require surgery and can affect how the face looks and functions long after the bones have healed.
• Burns from fire, chemicals, or hot surfaces can cause disfigurement that requires skin grafting, multiple reconstructive procedures, and still results in permanent scarring.
• Avulsion injuries involve skin or tissue being torn away. The resulting wounds are serious and the scarring significant.
• Eye injuries: Damage to the eye or the structures around it can affect both appearance and vision, sometimes permanently.
• Dental and jaw injuries: Broken teeth, a fractured or dislocated jaw, and damage to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) are common in car accidents and falls. These injuries are painful, expensive to treat, and can cause lasting problems with eating, speaking, and chronic jaw pain.

Why Facial Injury Cases Are Different

Facial injury cases involve something that most other personal injury claims don’t: permanent, visible consequences that affect how a person moves through the world every day.

Courts and juries in Illinois understand that a scar on the face is not the same as a scar on the leg. The face is what we present to others. It’s tied to identity, confidence, and how we experience relationships and professional life. A permanently disfiguring facial injury,  especially in a young person, or in someone whose work or social life depends heavily on appearance, can have consequences that extend far beyond the medical bills.

This is reflected in how these claims are valued. Facial injury cases often involve higher non-economic damages (what Illinois law calls pain and suffering, emotional distress, and disfigurement) precisely because the impact is so personal and so lasting.

What You Can Be Compensated For

• Medical expenses: Emergency treatment, surgery, hospitalization, plastic surgery, reconstructive procedures, skin grafting, scar revision surgery, dental work, and ongoing specialist care. These costs add up quickly, and your claim should account for future medical needs, not just the bills you’ve already received.
• Lost income: If your injuries required time away from work, or if they’ve affected your ability to perform your job, those losses are part of your claim. For people in client-facing roles, sales, entertainment, or any career where appearance matters, the professional impact of disfigurement can be significant and lasting.
• Pain and suffering: The physical pain of a serious facial injury is real and prolonged. Multiple surgeries, nerve damage, chronic pain from jaw or orbital fractures — these are not brief inconveniences.
• Emotional distress and disfigurement:  Illinois law specifically recognizes disfigurement as a compensable harm. Anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, difficulty in personal relationships, loss of confidence: these are well-documented consequences of serious facial injuries, and they deserve to be compensated.
• Loss of enjoyment of life:  If there are things you no longer do after your accident, like situations you avoid, activities you’ve given up, ways you’ve pulled back from the world that loss matters. 

The Role of Plastic Surgeons and Reconstructive Specialists

One of the most important things you can do after a facial injury is get connected with the right medical specialists.

A plastic surgeon or reconstructive specialist can document the nature and severity of your injuries in ways that a general practitioner cannot. They can speak to what treatment is necessary, what results are realistic, what scarring will be permanent, and what future procedures may be needed. That testimony, whether in a deposition or at trial, is often central to a facial injury case. It also starts with your medical records and what your doctor has documented on your behalf. This often includes pictures. 

Illinois has excellent reconstructive and plastic surgery resources, particularly in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. Getting to the right specialist early is important both for your outcome and for establishing the medical foundation your claim needs.

What the Insurance Company Will Argue

As a personal injury lawyer who deals with insurance companies all the time, I remind you that an adjuster’s job is to get rid of you as cheaply as they think they can get away with. They have excuses ready to throw at you in an attempt to minimize the injury to your face. They are not doctors. They are not you. Here are some of the more common arguments which they and their team of lawyers may try to use so that your injury does not sound as bad as it may actually be. Be ready for them. 

“It’s cosmetic.”

This is the most common and most frustrating dismissal. Insurance adjusters treat facial scarring as though it’s merely an aesthetic inconvenience driven by vanity, not genuine harm. Don’t accept that framing. Disfigurement is recognized as a distinct category of damages under Illinois law precisely because it is more than cosmetic.

“You’ll heal.”

Some injuries do improve with time and treatment. But many facial scars are permanent, and some improve only partially even with revision surgery. Your claim should be valued based on the realistic long-term prognosis made by your doctor or surgeon, not an optimistic prediction made in the early weeks by an insurance company representative.

“The surgery will fix it.”

Reconstructive surgery can improve appearance, but it rarely eliminates scarring entirely. And every surgery carries its own risks, recovery time, and cost. The fact that treatment exists doesn’t eliminate your right to compensation.

“You had skin issues before.”

If you had any prior skin conditions, acne scarring, or previous injuries in the same area, they will try to use that against you. Just as with other pre-existing conditions, Illinois law does not let them off the hook for making things worse. You know the difference between what your face was like before the accident, and what happened to you afterwards. Let’s make this known. 

Illinois Law and Your Claim

If your facial injuries resulted from someone else’s negligence — a careless driver, a property owner who failed to maintain safe conditions — you have the right to seek full compensation under Illinois law.

Illinois’s modified comparative negligence rule (735 ILCS 5/2-1116) allows you to recover even if you were partly at fault, as long as you were not more than 50% responsible.

In most cases, you have two years from the date of your injury to file a lawsuit (735 ILCS 5/13-202). In cases involving minors, different rules may apply. Don’t assume — talk to an attorney.

The Importance of Pictures

If you suffered a visible injury to your face or another part of your body, don’t forget to take pictures. Take lots of pictures. Some people have professional pictures taken of the injury to their face. I understand that this is not something to look forward to and will make most people feel extremely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Remember the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. This is especially true if you are trying to describe what your injury looked like. As you heal, your injury may change in appearance. Just like your medical records will be a key piece of evidence in a case, so will pictures. 

If You’ve Suffered a Facial Injury or Scarring in Illinois, Let’s Talk

A facial injury changes things. It’s not just what it does to your body — it’s what it does to how you feel walking into a room, how you show up in photographs, how you see yourself in the mirror. That kind of harm deserves to be taken seriously.

If you or someone you love has suffered a facial injury because of someone else’s negligence, I welcome the conversation. Give us a call today at either our Elgin or Schaumburg office.