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Facelift surgery or Rhytidectomy surgery is a surgery that corrects facial ptosis or facial
drooping. As we age we all lose volume in our face along with gravity in time cause
the face to droop or become sullen looking. Who's a good candidate for facelift surgery?
If you are healthy, you are already on your way to being a good candidate. We need to
see you in the office to evaluate the facial structure and what your concerns are. Very
often, the concerns that bring people to have an evaluation for facelift surgery are either
jowling in this area, ptosis or drooping in this area, excess skin or as what we call
the chicken neck, sometimes, is all reasons to have facelift surgery.
There are several different types of facelift surgery. We do everything from full facelifts,
mini lifts to just plain neck lifts. The difference is, how aggressive and how much correction
is needed.
For a neck lift the area we're correcting is literally from the jaw line down. And what's
that doing is correcting the crepiness of the neck as well as the, what we call mental
angle. This sub mental region from the chin down to the mid neck is called the submentum
and very often as we age that area changes. What we do with the neck lift is to aim to
recreate the way the neck look years ago.
A mini lift takes the neck into account and then the lower jaw line. Very commonly people
have jowling in this area as well as a blunted or crepey neck. The mini lift will address
that. And then a full facelift would address both the neck, the jowline as well as part
of the mid face. And what we are doing with the full facelift is really repositioning
the entire face. We're bringing the cheeks back up. We're bringing the jaw line back
into a crisp and sharp jawline and then we are getting rid of the crepiness of the neck
as well as reconstructing the sub mental angle.
The differences in the three facelifts that I described come down to the aggressiveness
of the surgery. There are also different techniques for all three of these procedures. The neck
lift very often is done with just small incision from the front of the ear, goes around the
ear and into the hairline. A mini lift the extension of that incision would be up to
this thing which is called the "Tragus" and then a full facelift, the incision comes all
the way up to the hairline up here back down around and then into the hairline.
The beauty of these procedures is if done correctly, the incision lines are virtually
invisible for all three of them. Some of these can be done in the office. Others, we ask
to do in the operating room. And once again, it's a very individualized thing. I would
ask you to come in and sit down and talk about it before we would make a decision on where
we could do this kind of a procedure. The procedures are done under a local
anesthetic, which is just a few injections in our procedure room in the office. Can be
done with what we call a contra sedation which is the same as a colonoscopy or
sometimes esophagoscopy. There's no intubation which is the breathing tube and patients often
get up and go home and feel great within an hour or two after surgery.
We also do some of these procedures under full general anesthesia as some people do
prefer that. After your surgery, I'll see you the next day in the office. You'll have
a special dressing or head wrap that we put on the day of surgery. The next day you'll
come in, you'll see the office staff and myself and we'll take the dressing down. We'll check
all the incision lines and make sure that everything is healing and looking great.
After the surgery, what you can expect is a little bit of facial swelling. Everybody
is different. Some people swell a little bit more that others. Some people bruise a little
bit. Taking the norm into consideration most people have roughly about a week of swelling.
The swelling can extend in all of the operated field and also down into the neck. Sometimes
there's also bruising, generally that's very mild though.
Usually within a week to two weeks, most of the swelling and bruising is gone. It doesn't
mean all of it is gone, but most of it is gone. Enough of the bruising is gone within
two weeks that you can return to work and normal activity. Sometimes the bruising will
stay a little bit longer but we can usually cover that up with a little makeup.
Depending on the type of surgery that we do, whether it's the facelift, the mini lift or
the neck lift, the recovery times are a little bit different. The neck lift or the mini lift,
there's a shorter healing time. And usually within 7-10 days patients are back at work,
back at normal daily activities and really nobody is wiser that you had any surgery.
A full facelift is a little bit longer. That's usually somewhere between 10 and 14 days.
Usually I tell patients that if they really don't want anybody know what they have done,
10-14 days and they're back to work and nobody has any idea.