“Another question that came up recently was “How long does a facelift last?” and there’s a lot of answers to that.
There are a lot of these marketed procedures, such as mini-lifts, quick-lifts and style-lifts. These lifts are very small procedures that involve a tiny little incision in front of the ear that makes skin slightly behind the ear, and they lift a tiny amount of skin, tighten a little bit of SMAS and the deep connective tissue layer, and then take a small amount of skin out, and close up.
This does a phenomenal amount of improvement in the facial wrinkles and contour and something like that may last for a year or so in terms of slight improvement. Obviously if you’re going to invest in that, I think there are probably better ways of addressing these kinds of issues.
The question as it relates to standard face-lifting procedures is that, it depends. We (plastic surgeons) are doing different types types of facelifts, including skin only, and others that that involve the SMAS layer, the deep connective tissue, and they have varied lengths.
I don’t do this skin only types of facelifts but a number of people do and they probably last somewhere between 3 and 7 years depending on sun damage and aging. When we get in the type of procedure that I do where we’re doing extensive use of the SMAS layer, the thick connective tissue layer in elevating and re-contouring the face and using that as the primary method of re-suspending or restoring the contours to the face and general tension on the skin, we can expect 10 to 15 years of duration with a facelift. So that’s the average patient and that’s kind of a big range but that’s as close as we get.
A lot of this depends on the patients sun exposure, their physical activity and lot of other factors that we don’t have control over but the most important thing about restoring contour is that in face-lifting in particular is a long lasting quality result turning the clock back but not stopping it from ticking. Thanks for visiting the DrMaas.com blog, please send in your questions.”
