Facelift

A facelift is a bespoke operation that needs to be tailored for your specific problems and needs.

David L Martin FRCS Plastic and Cosmetic Surgeon

All of a sudden everything seemed to drop!

The ladies who come to see me often have the same opening statement, “my face has all dropped!” and then they pull the facial skin back toward the ears to show me what they want.

When I do a facelift you will NOT be left with a wind swept, stretched facial appearance.

Most people are aware of what a facelift involves. The general belief is that it is an operation to tighten the skin. In fact, our understanding of the ageing process has improved considerably over the last decade, and the management of the ageing face has become more sophisticated.

A careful assessment needs to be made of how the ageing process has affected you as an individual. What is the quality of your skin? How have the tissues deep to the skin been affected? How have the facial contours changed? Is there an excess of fat under your chin?

The facelift may be one of several procedures that are carried out to get the optimum result.

Depending on this assessment, different techniques may be needed to get the most favourable overall result. For example, in addition to tightening up the tissues with a basic facelift technique, it may be necessary to do liposuction to the area under the chin to improve the appearance of the neck and chin, there may need to be fat grafting to the areas of the cheek just below the eyes to get rid of any areas of hollowness and improve the prominence of the cheekbones.

The different operations that are needed for you as a particular patient need to be discussed with you and explained so you can understand what the final objective is.

Who benefits:

A Facelift will:

Improve the jawline.
Improve the angle between the jaw and the neck and tighten the skin.
Improve the appearance of the jowls.

In general, as you might expect, patients who do best from this operation are those who have significant loose skin with a prominent jowly appearance to the jaw line and loose folds of skin on the neck.

A Facelift will not:

Change the appearance of your eyes or eyelids..
Produce significant changes to the middle part of your face.
Get rid of fine wrinkles.

If you have a lot of eyelid skin or bags under your eyes you will need eyelid surgery in addition to the facelift.

If you have areas of hollowness under your eyes or if your face looks like it needs to be plumped up to give it better shape, you will need fat grafting.

As you've hopefully realised from the discussion above, the surgical management of the ageing face needs to be carefully considered to get the best results.

So, when you come to see me, I may suggest a series of different operations, My intention will be to get you the best improvement by the suggested procedure(s) that will give you the longest lasting result.

Bring photographs of yourself taken over the past 5,10, 15 and 20 years so we can see how things have changed.....

To book a consultation please contact Janet, my PA, on:

01483 764 100

Photographs: I've not included photographs on this website. It is too much to ask any of my patients, even if they were willing to allow me to do so, to put their photographs onto the World Wide Web! I also feel that photographs taken from digital image banks are often not relevant and apart from making the website looked more glitzy, make no contribution. If you come for a consultation I can sometimes show you photographs of patients who I've operated on as they have kindly given me permission to do so in order to help new patients understand what is involved and what can be achieved..