Avoiding a bad facelift

The LA Times Magazine published the most comprehensive article I've run across about the facelift procedure.  If you're considering a facelift now or in the future, it's worthy of a read.

The story features Orange County plastic surgeon Dr. Bruce Connell, regarded as the pioneer and leading expert in facelift surgery. 

Connell routinely trains plastic surgeons on his facelift technique which emphasizes careful attention to detail in order to create a natural post-surgery look. Dr. Connell's facelifts require up to 6.5 hours. 

Connell points out that a bad facelift is often the result of a rush job.  Here are the potential downsides of a quick facelift:

A surgeon can quickly tighten the sides of the face, for example, with a slice along the front of the ear and into the hair, a yank of the loose skin and stitches to give a patient a hairline that sits back on the head like a Chinese Mandarin's. That same quickie on a man might result in earlobes with whiskers.  Some of the best-known surgeons will neglect to preserve the look of the tragus, that little flipper of cartilage at the front of the ear where face- lifts are often sutured.

...they will pull the earlobes forward and down and tack them onto the cheek--"pixie ear," surgeons call it, a rush-job staple that will be later camouflaged with long hair or those big button earrings that adorn so many matrons.

Or they will make incisions along the front of the ear that stand out like chalk lines on people with ruddy complexions. Or scalp incisions that create telltale bald spots.

Or they will lift just the delicate top layer of skin, rather than the more resilient muscle tissue beneath it, flattening the cheeks like a G-force simulator on a trainee at NASA.

Or they will lift both layers but carelessly reattach them.

[or] Just make a cut in front of the ears, undermine the skin, grab the deep sheet, pull to the ear, pull to the ear and you've got that wind tunnel look...

Clearly Dr. Connell's emphasis is on precision.  For the rest of us it's a good primer on the potential ways a quick, low cost facelift can leave you looking like work was done. 

Article: Take a Seat, and Dr. Connell Will Erase All Those Years