Benefits of a Facelift and Why This Procedure is Right for You To Regain Your Youth
The aging process catches up to all of us. No matter how beautiful you were in your 20s and 30s, aging causes even the greatest beauty to fade. However, you aren’t powerless in the face of the creeping advance of wrinkles, sagging skin, and decreased muscle tone. In fact, many women choose to use facelifts as tools to push back the aging process, and here at Boca Raton Plastic Surgery, we can help you defy the aging process with a facelift that’s tailored to fit your specific needs.
What Is a Facelift?
The technical term for a facelift is rhytidectomy, and the purpose of this procedure is to reduce the visible signs of aging on your face and neck. Facelifts are surgical procedures that are usually performed under anesthesia, and these procedures involve the restructuring of facial muscles and the introduction of filler materials to make your face look more youthful.
While facelifts do not stop the aging process, they do make you look younger, and a capable plastic surgeon can take a decade or more off the visible aging on your face and neck. Facelifts usually cause a significant degree of swelling and inflammation, but after these effects wear off, your neck and face will look much younger.
What Are Some Examples of Facelift Benefits?
Here are some examples of the facelift benefits that you can expect to experience if you undergo this procedure:
Improved Skin Elasticity
As you age, levels of a protein called elastin decrease in your skin. As the name suggests, elastin is the substance responsible for your skin’s elasticity or stretchiness, and loss of elastin can make your skin start to sag or wrinkle.
While improved diet and certain skin care treatments can help improve elastin levels in your skin, one of the best ways to defy the aging process is to have rhytidectomy performed on your face. While a facelift doesn’t introduce more elastin into your skin, it stretches your face to make it appear more stretchy or elastic.
Improved Muscle Tone
While they might not be readily visible when you look in the mirror, your face is permeated with a network of tiny muscles. This muscular network is called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system (SMAS), and it starts to naturally weaken as you age.
Since the SMAS keeps your skin tight and youthful, any reduction in the strength of this system will make your skin start to sag. Introducing more antioxidants into your diet or applying antioxidants directly to your skin may reduce the symptoms of reduced SMAS strength to a degree, but the only way to truly return your facial muscles to their youthful state is to tighten them with a facelift.
In most cases, the SMAS is tightened before the skin during a facelift procedure, which puts less tension on the skin and makes your facelift last longer. If a facelift is applied without SMAS tightening, your face may look tight or pinched, and the results of your facelift will dissipate relatively quickly.
Jowl Reduction
Jowls are among the most unsightly facial features that can appear as you age. These sagging flaps of skin hanging off the side of your face due to decreased protein levels in your face and the degradation of the SMAS. As part of your facial tightening procedure, the skin on the side of your face will be drawn up higher along your cheeks, which can practically eliminate visible jowls.
Crease Reduction
As you age, you may start to notice deep creases forming around the corners of your mouth and at the base of your nose. More than mere wrinkles, these creases can completely change the topography of your face, and they can make you feel like a stranger in your own body.
The skin and muscle tightening that occurs when you have a facelift smooths out these creases. This crease reduction makes you look younger, and it makes your skin healthier as well.
Neck and Chin Redefinition
While you might not have even noticed this fact when you were younger, the starkly defined contours of your chin and neck gave your face its sharp and perky look in your 20s and 30s. Now that you’re older, these contours are less defined, but you can bring them back by tightening your face muscles and skin with a facelift.
Should You Choose a Mini Facelift?
Depending on your situation, you may want to consider getting a mini facelift instead of a full facelift. While full facelifts can produce great results, these procedures are significantly invasive, and the facelift recovery process can sometimes be difficult and lengthy.
Mini facelifts, however, are relatively non-invasive, and recovering from mini facelifts is easier. For instance, you won’t have to undergo general anesthesia when you get a mini facelift; instead, your plastic surgeon will use local anesthesia when they perform your mini facelift procedure. If you don’t like the feeling of losing consciousness while undergoing surgery, a mini facelift might be the perfect option for you.
Since most mini facelifts only address the SMAS without tightening your skin, you’ll recover from a mini facelift faster than you would from a traditional facelift. In some cases, plastic surgeons might include deep plane restructuring as part of the full facelift process, but this invasive and intensive procedure entails a recovery process that can last months.
In addition, mini facelift procedures leave you less at risk of developing unsightly scarring. These procedures involve small incisions, but traditional facelifts involve much larger incisions, which can leave behind scars. Most women choose to hide their facelift scars with their hair, but it’s better to just not have any scars at all.
Lastly, mini facelifts can provide nearly the same results as full facelifts without the scarring, anesthesia, or invasive procedures. If your skin only displays relatively mild laxity and a slight diminishment of jawline definition, you might be the perfect candidate for a mini facelift.
Regain Your Youth with a Facelift Today
If you’re looking for a facial plastic surgeon in Boca Raton who can give you back your youth without the hassle, rely on Boca Raton Plastic Surgery to give you your youth back. We carefully assess your situation and develop a facelift strategy that delivers the exact results you’re looking for, and as a top-rated facial plastic surgeon in Boca Raton, we always stand by our commitment to our customers. To start looking youthful again, give us a call today.
