Facelift Vs. Fat Injections to Look 5 Years Younger?

It is clear your research is paying off. Our understanding of facial aging has improved dramatically over the last ten years. Prior to that surgical facelifting was the standard. Volume replacement and concern over the quality of the facial skin was of secondary importance. Now we know that placing structures in the appropriate position with surgery is one part of the rejuvenation process. Excellent fillers are now available to restore facial volume and surgical fat grafting to the face yields wonderful results. Laser resurfacing and radiofrequency devices cna improve texture and tighten skin. At age 30 facial fillers such as juvederm and sculptra can work wonders. Early intervention will slow the aging process and keep you looking younger longer.Seek out a board certified plastic surgeon to help you understand your options. Good luck and keep up the research.

 

 

 

Your comments are insightful. Essentially 3 things happen to the face as we age. First, the skin becomes lax causing wrinkles to appear. Second, the tissue overlying the muscle underneath the skin starts to fall down and forward causing the cheeks to lose volume, deepens our nasolabial folds, causes jowls to appear, adds heaviness to the bottom part of our face, and makes our jawline look  poorly defined. Third, we lose fat in our face, making us look less soft (soft= young) and more harsh (harsh=old). As we get older, we look best when we have corrected all 3 issues. Good quality skin care (regular use of tretinoin, antioxidants, and human derived growth factors), chemical peels, and laser procedures will keep our skin looking young and tight. A facelift addresses the tissue underneath the skin that has moved down and forward by moving it back to its original position. Repositioning this tissue increases cheek fullness, softens the nasolabial folds, changes the overall shape of the face giving it a more youthful oval appearance, sharpens the jaw line, and smoothes the neck. Adding back volume to the face can occur in several ways. The most common (and easiest) way to do this is with fillers. High volume fillers (Radiesse or Perlane) work very well at adding back youthful volume to the cheeks. The softer HA fillers (Juviderm or Restylane) work well to soften the nasolabial folds, improve the contour and/or add back volume to the lips, lift the corners of the mouth, or fill specific wrinkles. These fillers last anywhere from 6 months to almost 2 years, usually require only a topical anesthetic, and are injected in the office. Fat injections (taking your fat from another part of your body and injecting it into your face) is much longer lasting, but does require anesthesia, takes hours to do, and has a fairly long recovery time. It does make sense to be forward thinking and come up with a plan ahead of time for how you are going to deal with the aging process. For most 30 year olds great skin care is essential. This would include certain products every day and a plan for integrating peels and lasers. Fillers (usually only a small volume is needed at 30 years old) can then be used as needed to replace the early volume loss as it occurs. This approach should keep you looking young for many years (which is, after all, what we are trying to achieve). The time to consider a facelift is when the more aggressive aging has occurred (when the tissue overlying the muscle has started to fall). At that time, fat injections done at the same time as the facelift would make sense.