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Hi, Dr. Lowenstein here in Santa Barbara, I want to briefly cover some anatomy of the face which will help you understand why we do lower facelifts when we're trying to address the neck. In the face, you have skin and then you have fat underneath there, and underneath there, you have something called the SMAS, which is the subcutaneous musculoaponeurotic system. And in this SMAS, you have connected tissue and fat. And this is the tissue area that has a lot of the fat associated with the face.

And the SMAS tissue is in continuity or connected to the platysma muscle, which is a broad, flat muscle just underneath the skin that allows you to do that. It's a lip depressor, but it's the thing that also gives us bands down here. So because these two things are connected, as we started to get redundancy down here, we can do one of two things. If we have just a little bit, often-times we can do an interior or posterior neck lift where this is all addressed just by undermining, doing some manipulation and just re-draping here.

You're going to be more likely to do this at home and see the advantage, but if you have a significant amount of breast tissue here, go to the mirror and just push up on the face, and you'll see that if we pull the SMAS up, it fixes the neck because the SMAS tissue is connected to the platysma tissue. So it's all part of the same problem, and so when we do a facelift, we lift the skin and address the SMAS by pulling it north and re-creating the mid face fullness that's a sign of youth.

It also helps break all of this tighter up against the neck and really helps fix the neck, so that's why, a lot times when you’ll say, "Hey, I want to come in and just get a neck lift," you're going to hear a lower face and neck life is really the best way to go because it's going to give the nicest, most natural return to a rejuvenated state. Hope that helps, thanks, take care!

The Anatomy of a Facelift

Dr. Adam Lowenstein explains the anatomy of the face for a better understanding of why a lower facelift is recommended when the patient's concerns are about their neck.