The Art of the Natural Facelift Result

May 03, 2019

By Dr. Frank Lista, MD., FRCSC., Medical Director and Founder, The Plastic Surgery Clinic

Facelift remains one of the most misunderstood surgeries in the popular imagination. The biggest reason for this could be that the effects of plastic surgery are only noticeable when the result doesn’t look natural. Consequently, people tend to assume that an “overdone” look is the only outcome of a cosmetic procedure even though they’ve probably seen examples of subtle, natural results in real life—they just haven’t noticed.

So it makes sense that lots of people still assume that a facelift will produce an unnatural look. If you’ve ever looked through magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle, you’ve probably seen “that look” critiqued harshly over and over again.

But if you’ve watched any of our videos or checked out our other blog posts, you know that if there’s one thing we’re passionate about, it’s achieving the most natural look possible. It’s something that we love about our work, but more importantly, it’s something that our patients love.

When a patient loves their result so much that they share photos with us only a few weeks after their operation to show how thrilled they are already, we can’t help but feel lucky to do the work that we do. That’s the case with our recent facelift patient, who sent us these photos only 3 weeks after her surgery, and it’s easy to see why she’s so excited about her natural look.

So how did we achieve it?

How We Performed This Facelift

This patient underwent a lower face and neck lift to address her primary areas of concern. We tightened the muscles and skin to give her a smoother neck and jawline, which also helped to improve tightness in the facial skin.

We wanted to accentuate her result by addressing both the quality of the skin and the loss of volume that occurs with the aging process that a facelift alone cannot change. To do this, we took a small amount of fat from her abdominal area and injected it into her facial skin. Amazingly, fat has even more stem cells than bone marrow, which accounts for its ability to rejuvenate the quality of the skin.

It has the added effect of filling out the cheek line, creating a softer look. The increased volume in her central face helps fill out any remaining looseness in that area. We also injected fat in the tear trough area to help give a more rested and refreshed appearance to the eyes.

Fat transfer is permanent, meaning that the improvement that she sees will last permanently. That doesn’t mean that she will look like this forever—the aging process will continue, but these improvements will be at its foundation. She will always look more in line with the goal she had in mind when she first came to see us.