Best Facelift NYC
A Facelift is the most popular and definitive way to rejuvenate an aging face. It helps in restoring the droopiness and jowling in your face as well as the sagging neck appearance. Even though there is no proven study to establish the superiority of one technique over the other, The Deep Plane Facelift has become extremely popular and is gaining prominence as the gold standard for facial rejuvenation.
Deep Plane Facelift: Is it the best technique for facial rejuvenation?
My Personal Opinion on Facelift Surgery
This blog is my personal opinion and is based on my experience with facelift surgery. Facelift is not a skin surgery and the lift has to come from deeper layers of the face a.k.a SMAS in the face and platysma in the neck. Any facelift done with just pulling the skin will probably last just a few weeks. The simplest way to do a Facelift is SMAS plication which is suturing the SMAS layer of the face without undermining it. I have never been a big fan of this technique because I always believe that some undermining below the SMAS layer helps in releasing the tethering and gives a better lift.
This technique is generally called SMAS facelift. Depending on the extent of undermining, it can be a high SMAS (above the Zygomatic arch) or a low SMAS lift (below the zygomatic arch). This was my go-to technique when I started doing facelifts in my practice. Even though the results were pretty decent, I felt that there was something amiss. “Close, but no cigar” is probably the best expression for my experience with the traditional SMAS Facelift. And then came my rendezvous with the ‘Deep Plane Facelift’ technique.
What is a Deep Plane facelift
A very good analogy to explain Deep Plane Lift is “trying to lift a rug that’s stuck to the floor”. The rug in this analogy is the SMAS (in your face) and Platysma (in your neck), while the floor is the deeper layers of the face to which it is tethered. In a traditional facelift with the SMAS technique, you cut the edges of the rug and partially unglue it. Then move the rug by tying the edges together. While it definitely is helpful; the underlying problem is that the rug is still stuck to the floor underneath.
With the deep plane facelift technique, you completely unglue the rug from the floor. It helps in multiple ways. Now that the rug is completely freed up from its underlying floor, it can be very freely moved in a vector in which it fell down. Also, because of this reason, the results are more natural and arguably have increased longevity. The other benefit of all the lift coming from the deeper layer of the face is that there’s no tension on the skin during the closure and it heals in a way that the surgical scar is pretty imperceptible within a few months.
The other important modification that I have incorporated with Deep Plane Facelift is doing an Extended Neck Lift – which is lifting the deeper layers of your neck a.k.a Platysma (akin to lifting released SMAS in the face) laterally in addition to contouring the neck from midline incision. The combination of central and lateral neck-lift works synergistically with the Deep Plane Facelift for the lower and mid-face.
In my personal experience, my outcome and overall results have elevated to a totally different level since incorporating deep plane facelifts and extended neck lifts in my practice and is now my preferred technique to do face facelifts.
