Facelift Surgery

One of my favorite procedures to do is facelifts. Facelifts, to me, are the ultimate in achieving the balance between surgery and art because we’re taking a patient’s face, the thing that they present in public every day, and we’re not changing it but we’re working on it to make it look like it once did.

Full facelifts involve moving the mid-face, this part of the face. When a surgeon talks about doing a facelift, they’re really talking about elevating the tissues that have drooped over time, basically the aging process goes this way, and restoring those facial tissues back to where they once were when the patient was younger.

So, a facelift isn’t about tightening the skin or overly stretched, although that look is out there, and I don’t like that look at all. We try to give the patient a refreshed, natural, lifted back to where they once were maybe ten or twenty years earlier, and give them very beautiful and natural results. In fact, the biggest compliment I get from my patients is when they come back and say, “You know, nobody has really said to me ‘What did you do to your face?’ They say, ‘Did you lose weight? Did you change your hair? You look different, but you look great.’"

And they don’t know that they had plastic surgery. To me that’s the highest compliment.

One of the questions I get a lot from patients when they come in for facelift consults is, “Am I too young or am I too old to have a facelift?”

What I have found in my 25 years of doing plastic surgery, the people that are coming in in their sixties, seventies and even at eighty--I just did a facelift on an eighty-year-old a week and a half ago and she did amazingly well. What I’ve discovered is as this generation ages, they’re staying healthier, they exercise every day and they’ve been taking good care of their skin with facial products. So, when they come in at sixty-five or seventy and ask am I too old to have a facelift-absolutely not.

So, what I tell my patients who are younger when they come in asking if “I’m too young,” I ask them “Well what bothers you? What would you like to see different?” If a facelift is going to fix that then that’s the procedure they should have. There’s a stigma out there that one should not have facial surgery or facelift when you’re in your forties or thirties because you’re too young and you don’t need it. Well, some people actually do need it when they’re thirty or forty whether it be genetics, smoking, being in the sun, a lot of their facial tissues have drooped, they’ve developed significant wrinkling, things have just dropped or they developed an accumulation of fat that they don’t like how it looks when they look in in the mirror. If they want to do things that are non-surgical like fillers, liposuction or lasers, well that’s fine but if it’s not going to address the concerns that they see when they look in the mirror then a facelift is the answer.