Is laser resurfacing okay to perform during a facelift?

Hello and thank you for your question. I would not recommend performing the laser resurfacing at the same time as the facelift. The reason is because during a facelift, you dissect the skin and subcutaneous fat from the mid/lower face and neck off of the deeper structures (SMAS layer in the face, and platysma muscle in the neck). This results in a vascular insult to the skin from below- it is then relying purely on undissected blood vessels and largely their distribution of blood, oxygen and nutrients through the random deep dermal capillary network within the dissected face/neck skin. Assuming the patient is a nonsmoker, this is usually more than sufficient and heals very well. When you perform laser resurfacing, you damage the skin from above, as you remove some of the outermost layer(s) to allow new, better quality skin to heal in from below. As a result, when you perform both a facelift and laser resurfacing at the same time, you are introducing insults to the skin from both above and below, further stressing/compromising the vascularity, and increasing the risk of skin/wound complications (e.g. delayed/poor wound healing, skin ischemia/necrosis, infection, etc).
Based on all that, my practice separates these into two separate procedures. The only exception for me is when I am performing laser resurfacing on an area which is untouched/uninvolved during the facelift (e.g. laser to eyelids during surgical facelift), since this only introduces one insult to the skin at each location. Every surgeon is different, and some still feel it is safe to perform facelift and laser resurfacing at the same time. I hope this helps!
Best wishes,
Dr. Donald Groves
Plastic Surgeon

While lasers can be performed at the time of a facelift, it is better to do them separatelyunless you are performing a lighter peel or laser treatment. By definition, a lift means the skin has been lifted from the deeper tissue. This results in less blood flow to the skin. Proper deep laser treatment to remove wrinkles and pigmentation needs good blood flow to heal well. If, let us say a Fractional CO2 laser treatment (gold standard for laser resurfacing) one will hesitate to go deep enough as you are concerned about healing. It is safer, better, and more effective to stage it. Laser down time is a week. The final results are what matters. A mild peel is ok.

It is common people get laser resurfacing at the end of the facelift procedure. Most of the time when you are under anesthesia already the provider can go deeper with the laser because you will not feel the effect of it at the time and can create better end results. It will help with tightening the skin as well.