Face Lift Surgery

For optimal results, Dr. Robinson recommends pursuing lower face lift surgery at the early signs of aging, while tissues are still elastic.

DR. ROBINSON: Face lift is different things to different lay people. They think a face lift is making an incision around the whole face and pulling things tight. What we’re talking about is a lower face lift to improve the jaw line and improve the neck line. That’s essentially what we’re talking about. It’s a very rejuvenating procedure and in the past it used to be patients would wait until they were really relaxed and had a lot of significant jowling [phonetic], neck laxity. And as a result would come in almost too late because half the success of that procedure is the surgeon, but the other half is what do you tighten? Are you tightening a little bit of a stretch rubber band or a frayed rope? And so, over the years, we have learned, obviously you don’t do un-indicated surgery, patients don’t have any issues or signs of aging, we don’t want to do surgery. But when they start to get those early signs of aging, they get a better result, longer last result than waiting too far down the road when the tissues aren’t going to respond as well. The procedure takes about three hours, done in the operating room. We typically like to keep those patients overnight. That’s the only procedure I really feel patients should stay overnight because we put a dressing on that’s somewhat tight, just for the night. It doesn’t really hurt, it just feels kind of tight and we want to make sure their doing okay with that. They stay in their own private suite and the next morning they go home. And they’re out of circulation 12 days. And during those 12 days we just ask them not to drive or to lift anything heavier than a yellow pages phone book. After that, they’re back out at 12 days, maybe with a little makeup, they have a little bruising, virtually no swelling. As far as patients liking it, it’s just so rejuvenating. There’s nothing worse than to lose your jaw line or your neck line and you hear patients all the time come in, I got pictures with my daughter or my grandkids and that’s it. I can’t have anymore pictures taken like that. And once they get that rejuvenation, they usually look in the mirror and they go hello, where have you been? It’s just funny.