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The male facelift is rapidly becoming one of the fastest growing procedures in Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles but the same it is true everywhere in the world. The competitive atmosphere embracing the work environment today emphasizes how important is to look “the best” you can look. That includes a youthful fresh image of our self! Today most of the men I know focus their attention on a healthy lifestyle which includes exercise, good diet, and spiritual health. Most of them are in great shape but the aging face and especially the neck laxity does not match with the body.
Therefore a lot of men are approaching facial rejuvenation as an option to look younger.
Male patients, though, are very different then female patients: they want different things and the approach to facial rejuvenation in men has to be tailored to their needs.
There are several issues that a man has to keep in mind when considering face lift surgery.
Usually men have no time or very little time to recuperate. They are very busy working, they can not afford to take a long time off and they want to look good almost immediately! The first question I get asked by men in my Rancho Mirage and Beverly Hills offices are:” When can I go back and play golf?” So it is very important to tailor the face lift surgery to be the shortest recovery time available. More importantly, men can not afford to look “done”. If it is a taken that women undergo plastic surgery, men are still looked “not as masculine” if they seek attention by a plastic surgeon. Also they usually don’t have a lot of hair to hide the scars and a therefore can not afford any of the tail-tell signs of having had a facelift.
To avoid the “done” look I Introduced several years ago the vertical face lift where the vectors and direction of pull are drastically changed from the traditionally horizontal approach ( the more common and almost universal technique) to a more natural vertical repositioning of the facial tissues, recreating a more natural framework of the aging facial structures.
Also the volumizing theory applies in men as well, where it is not important to pull the skin tight in the wrong direction like most face lift do, but it is much more crucial to recreate the lost volume in the face. That is the reason why we often combine the face lift procedure with fat grafting.
One step further is the cell-enhanced face lift where the fat is turbo-charged by adding stem and other type of cells with the help of the Celution device by Citory. With this technique it is postulated that we can actually improving the texture of the skin and there fore rejuvenate the skin itself. This is the ultimate goal of face lift surgery: being able to reposition tissues but at the same time make the skin itself look younger. The early results are very promising.
Other important issues are the ancillary procedures often combine with face lift surgery in men.
Blepharoplasties, both superior and inferior, are commonly performed in combination with face lift but a word of caution is warrant. Too many times an overdone upper blepharoplasty creates unnatural, “done” changes and gives the unfortunate patient the stigmata of a surgical look.
You see it on celebrities all the time, especially male actors. The “round” look of the eyes is a clear give away sign of past surgery. I usually don’t perform upper blepharoplasty in men and when I do in extreme cases, I’m extremely conservative so I don’t deliver that “skeletonized” look.
The same judgment should be used for the lower blepharoplasty where a fat repositioning procedure is chosen over a traditional blepharoplasty where the fat has been removed and in the long run it will caused a “hollow” look.
Brow lift should never been performed on men: they will feminize their faces too much.
The incision of the face lift should be placed inside the ear cartilage and the anatomy of the ear should not be changed. Too many times I see blunt ear cartilages as a classic sign of post face lift surgery. Also the tension placed on the scars is crucial to produce hypertrophic visible scars, there fore I developed a closure called the “vip closure” which takes away the tension on the incisions, and so they can heal leaving as little evidence as possible. The ear lobe itself is a tail-tell sign of having had surgery: it should be stitched at a 15 degrees angle posteriorely. Too many times I see it with a straight axis, and that does not look natural.
In conclusion, male face lift is a much different operation then in a female. Attention to details is much more important as delivering a natural “undone” look. Using the same “cocky cutter” approach in all case is a recipe for disaster and in men it is much more difficult to correct.
