Facelifts and other non-surgical techniques for getting rid of sagging excess facial skin and especially those loose Jowls that age older women. Depending on the severity of the excess sagging skin, sometimes a judicious facelift is a worthwhile investment for women in their fifties or sixties looking for a new career, love life, or lease on life. Would you ever get a facelift?
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Loose jowls around the jaw line are unsightly and a major sign of aging for women. If the problem is severe, often times a mid face lift is the only long lasting effective remedy. Younger women may be able to get away with facial injections to fill out the facial skin in the mid face so that less of it drops down and sags around the jaw line.
Loose Jowls
Two major signs of aging in a women are loose crepe neck skin and laxity along the jaw line. A neck lift can address loose skin in the neck area in addition to poor neck definition under the chin. But a neck lift generally concentrates below the angle of the jaw and does little to improve or get rid of jowls. Other non surgical techniques such as the thread lift and Thermage do not as work long term as a bonefide facelift will and can even be costly or ineffective. In a woman over fifty, the problem of loose jowls is usually corrected with a facelift.
Jowl implants or Cosmetic Fillers
Cosmetic fillers such as Juvederm, Restylane, Radiance or Sculptra can fill out a dropping jowl or nasolabial folds around the nose yet in an aging woman past her fifties they will only be able to temporarily improve the contour and will not be able to permanently fix sagging jowls.
Facial fat can also be grafted from other areas of the body and then injected into the sagging face to plump up marionette lines and loss of volume. Adding volume in the face with either fillers or even cheek implants can take up some of the skin laxity and fill it out thereby reducing the sagging skin in the lower face. Thread lifts in my opinion are weird and do not work and will pull the skin for a while and then relax. If you are considering a thread lift you may want to get consultations and weigh the pros of getting a real face lift against the thread lift option.
The fact is though, these solutions will only fill out skin in women who have pre-jowl problems and in whom the sagging is not that great. There comes a point when the only long term improvement is to get a traditional facelift.
Why women get unsightly loose jowls
When you lose volume in the face, the cheeks and jaw line area especially become more prominent. Jowls come as a result of the gravitational descent of the cheeks! Smoking and other ill-advised health habits can also influence the health of your skin. People who smoke, drink or follow an unhealthful diet can experience faster skin aging than others. Weight loss can leave you with lose skin that was previously plumped up by fat and now falling lax with the weight gone. Sun tanning is also a major culprit of aging. You could look at the age of a horse women who has been riding for decades with no hat on – I guarantee this woman will look at least 20 years older than her true age. Sun damage and lifestyle choices ages the skin big time.
Some of it is bad health habits that speed up the aging process, some is your family genetics and ethnicity and skin type, and some is just aging and getting old, pure and simple. It’s basic aging in the middle face and you would need to address it with a mini face lift or mid face lift. Some face lifts are just a skin pull or skin tightening, while others are more major involving correcting and tightening the underlying facial muscles.
Surgical and non-surgical sagging skin solutions
When you have a combination of volume loss, mid face sagging and loose skin, the surgeon might employ more than one technique to the problem. For example, they might give you a mid face lift and inject a transfer of fat into your face to restore volume. Some women get too much fat in the chin area creating a so called turkey gobble neck or a double chin. That fat can be liposuction-ed and processed into a fat transfer injection which can be transferred into the upper face and check area to restore a plump youthful volume. Restoration of facial volume is really important for women who have a gaunt look to them. Cheek implants also serve to restore volume in the mid face. For women with serious gauntness, just pulling back the skin won’t fix the entire problem and they need their mid face to look more rounded out again too, ergo the combination mid face lift with injections or even cheek implants.
Non surgical options from cosmetic injections to fat transfer to fraxel repair, thermage or thread lifts will do little to permanently resolve major sagging jowl lines. However, if you are younger and merely need a moderate plumping or slight filling then these options could be explored by getting consultations to see what works best for you.
Mini Jowl Lift
Some surgeons do a slight face lift variation called a mini jowl lift wherein they pull the skin up just a bit in a partial face lift and they do not in those cases address the underlying facial muscles as do real face lifts. This is an example how surgeons are created new milder variations of the traditional face lift to address certain problems in the faces of younger women wanting real long lasting results with minimal down time.
Risk verses Cost
Injections and facial treatments such as Fraxel and Thermage are quite expensive. So at a certain point a women has to weigh the risk verses the benefits. If your skin is clearly sagging and you are over fifty, it may be more cost effective to get an actual mid face lift or a mini face lift targeting the problem area. If you are under fifty and just seeing more slight aging signs, a filler might hold you over with far less surgical risks. A lot of it depends on your age and the severity of the problem.
The social climate in this day and age is ruthless and still heavily dependent on looks. Whether you find yourself thrown in the abyss of suddenly single and internet dating or trying to get back into a non-existant career job after you’ve been raising kids for years, having youthful looks does matter. It helps to look polished and good, both personally and in the corporate world. Therefore, if you perceive yourself to have a major problem it is certainly not a crime to look into the possible solutions and get consultations as to what you can do about it. Make sure to research thoroughly before taking action. The women in the above face lift photographs look wonderful and I sincerely doubt they regret the reparative jowl work that they had done.
