The Keys to a Successful and Natural-Looking Facelift

You stand before the mirror, place your fingers on either side of your face, and pull back. And you wonder — Is there a way to get back to this more youthful version of yourself? 

The short answer is a resounding yes, but if you want the job done well, with results that are both natural-looking and last for years to come, it involves a little more than just tightening your skin.

Here at Jonathan Zelken, MD, board-certified plastic surgeon Dr. Zelken prides himself on delivering facelifts that meet and exceed our clients’ expectations. At our practice, we understand that facelifts are far more than just skin deep, and we personalize our procedures to each patient's unique needs and goals, making no two of our facelifts exactly alike.

The forces of aging in the face

To better understand why facelifts entail more than just simply pulling your skin taut, it’s helpful to review what you’re up against when it comes to aging in your face.

Several forces conspire to rob your face of its youth, including:

• Exposure — the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays prematurely break down skin
• Loss of volume — the thin layer of fat under your skin shifts and/or disappears
• Bone loss — the facial skeleton experiences an overall decrease in volume
• Loss of collagen — as you age, you lose collagen production (collagen is the protein responsible for support in your skin)

Fleshing out the collagen loss a little further, both men and women lose collagen production over time, but this loss can be especially acute in women who transition through menopause — women lose about 30% of their collagen in the first five years of menopause.

Fighting back with a facelift

Given the multiple aging challenges, you can see that simply settling for tighter skin won’t do the job. You want to address all simultaneously, which is where Dr. Zelken excels. Instead of just skin-only facelifts, which inevitably fail in the long term, we prefer deep-plane facelifts that address three key areas:

1. Releasing retaining ligaments

Your face has three sets of cutaneous retaining ligaments that hold your skin in place — around your eyes, cheeks, and chin. When Dr. Zelken performs a facelift, he releases these ligaments to make the skin-tightening step more effective and sustainable.

2. Adding volume

Another key to a successful and natural-looking facelift is to restore lost volume, which Dr. Zelken accomplishes with fat grafting and implants. We offer several different facial implants, including implants that we place just beneath your nose, cheek implants, and chin implants.

3. Skin tightening

Once Dr. Zelken addresses the deeper-plane issues, he pulls your skin taut over the new substructures to put the final — and most visible — touches on the work. Without addressing the underlying issues beforehand, simply pulling older, weakened skin tight will only damage the tissues, and the skin tightening won’t last very long. 

By setting the stage correctly with ligament release and volume restoration, the final piece of the facelift puzzle — skin tightening — will last far longer and look more natural.

For a more detailed and visual look at how Dr.  Zelken approaches facelifts, please click here for a quick video.

To explore how Dr. Zelken can help you dial back the years in your face with a comprehensive and detail-oriented facelift, we invite you to call our office in Newport Beach, California, at (949) 432-4730. Or, you can use our online booking tool to request a consultation.