What to Expect After Your Facelift: Recovery and Results
A facelift is a major surgical procedure and requires a recovery period before you can see your results. Here’s what you can expect during that period.
It used to be a great spectator sport — gawk at celebrities to see who got a face-lift. You could always tell because the faces looked too tight, too unnatural to be real. Today, though, with advances in plastic surgery techniques, a face-lifted face can look as natural as one that hasn’t had any work done.
At PNW Plastic Surgery in Portland, Oregon, board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Leo Urbinelli and his team offer the most cutting-edge and longest-lasting face-lifts, all centered around their patients’ happiness and wellbeing. Here’s how their natural-looking face-lifts can help you meet your aesthetic goals.
Deep lines and creases occur as you get older due to a decrease in production of two structural proteins — collagen and elastin. While you have plenty of these proteins to give your skin strength and flexibility when you’re younger, production begins to decline around age 25, leading to the visible signs of aging.
As you get older, too, fat stores in your face start to migrate and diminish, leading to sunken cheeks, bags under your eyes, and a drooping jawline.
Medically called a rhytidectomy, a face-lift is a cosmetic procedure that addresses age-related changes of your face and neck, restoring a youthful look. More specifically, a face-lift treats:
A face-lift doesn’t address the textural changes in your skin due to sun damage. Those are better addressed by nonsurgical cosmetic procedures such as microneedling, which we also offer at our office.
Dr. Urbinelli uses a number of different face-lift techniques, depending on your health, the condition of your skin, and your aesthetic goals.
The least invasive face-lift that Dr. Urbinelli uses is called “short scar,” and it’s minimally invasive. The technique leaves very small, “hidden” scars.
This option is ideal for bald men since there’s no hairline in which to hide the scar, as well as younger/middle-aged patients with little-to-no neck laxity and patients who want a “skin only face-lift.”
The results are compelling, but they’re less extensive than other techniques, and they don’t last as long. However, you require less downtime after your surgery.
This innovative face-lift technique focuses on lifting the muscle, fat, and loose skin on the lower two-thirds of your face.
Hiding the incisions in your hairline, Dr. Urbinelli separates the skin from the underlying tissues, then tightens the SMAS layer, rearranges fat, and removes excess skin before replacing the skin over the “lifted” sublayers. The technique improves jowls, gives volume to flattened/depressed cheeks, fills in deep nasolabial folds, and removes saggy skin under the chin.
And the best part? No one will be able to tell you had the work done.
Dr. Urbinelli may use this technique to give you a rested and youthful appearance. Here, he works on layers deeper than the sub-SMAS. He elevates and releases problem areas that require more extensive dissection and elevation, ensuring powerful and natural-looking long-term results.
Do face-lifts look unnatural? Not if you have a surgeon like Dr. Urbinelli, whose eye toward aesthetics is just as keen as his surgical skill. To learn more, and to find out if you’re a good candidate, call PNW Plastic Surgery at 503-208-2348 to schedule a consultation, or book your appointment online today.
