Dr. Yannis Alexandrides: It is busier than ever. There’s a remarkable year-on-year demand increase that we see in surgical procedures, especially for the face, but also for the body. This is a trend that we have seen through the pandemic, but it has accelerated the last year.
Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.
Dr. Akshay Sanan: I think plastic surgery is in a renaissance period right now because of people publicly talking about it. Plastic surgery is now part of your wellness armamentarium. People used to flex what gym they went to, that they had a trainer, and now plastic surgery is part of that flex. People love to rock that they had their eyes done or their face and neck done or their body done. It’s just part of the cultural shift that we’re seeing.
Dr. Emily Hu: I find it very generational: Those who grew up in the social media era with a lot of sharing and openness are also very open about telling their friends [about the work they’ve had done].
Sanan: There’s a shift in consumer or patient habits. More people in their late 30s, early 40s, they’re choosing surgery earlier to age gracefully instead of waiting until things are advanced. They’re like, “I’m not going to wait until it drops down further. I just want to be hot in my 40s.”
Dr. John Diaz: It used to be that not everyone had access to a plastic surgeon. That was reserved within the realm of the elite. Well, not anymore. I have celebrities, executives, and business owners come in — but also teachers and waiters. There’s this democratization of attractiveness.
Dr. Paul Afrooz: Patients are very educated these days. They know what they’re looking for, they know what realistic results are, and they have the ability to do a lot of background research and understand who does things at an elite level.
Diaz: When I first moved to LA, if I was at an event and someone heard that I was a plastic surgeon, they would pull me aside later and be like, “Can I ask you a question?” Now, I’ve been at dinner parties where we have 20 people at the table, someone hears I’m a plastic surgeon, and they’re yelling at me across the room: “Hey, I got my breasts done two months ago, and I love them!”
Dr. Paul Nassif: I just had a patient today from a pretty popular reality show who wants me to do their nose and put it on social media. They want to go through the whole experience and show people. They want to educate.
Champagne: I saw a post today from someone who said, “I don’t want to be a gatekeeper. I don’t want to hide the fact that I do things, because it’s not fair to other people to think that this is achievable or this is just how I was born.” It’s a good thing that people are willing to talk about it.
Alexandrides: There is a little bit of pressure on people who are always in front of a lens. You post on Instagram, you are on TikTok, and then you have interviews, and [plastic surgery] is difficult to hide. Even if you want to say, “I look 40, but I’m 60, and I haven’t done anything” — people don’t believe you. There is a certain level of pressure on these people to pretty much explain what happened instead of other people speculating and just creating a whole buzz around it.
Dr. Charles Galanis: People are being more transparent with plastic surgery, but I say that with a caveat — that’s only for certain procedures. Body contouring will be the last frontier of someone being honest. Plenty of people in TV and film would be terrified if someone knew that they had a body contouring, like a lipo contouring procedure. I’ve had patients who’ve been public about what they had done with me — but only 50% of what they had done with me.
Let’s get into it: Why are we talking so much about facelifts this year?
Diaz: Facelifts have absolutely exploded for a few reasons. A lot of women see celebrities and influencers suddenly looking incredible, and they want to know how. Think about Kris Jenner — she had a huge impact when her pictures came out. And now it’s brought awareness to the fact that we have the technology to be able to take a young-looking woman and make her look better with surgery, without making her look fake. That was a real challenge 20 years ago.
Alexandrides: Kris Jenner was a very hot topic the last few months. Definitely a lot of the patients I see here take her as, let’s say, a model on how they want to look, because she looks fresh, but she doesn’t look pulled. She looks younger, and she looks happy, and you cannot see the scars, at least not in these pictures that we see.
Hu: I can’t tell you how many of my patients are like, “Yeah, my mom had a facelift. She was so scary. I’m never doing a facelift.” I mean, that was their response because they see their mom all bruised and scary looking.
Dr. Mark Murphy: Facelifts historically had a stereotypical “plastic surgery” look. Now people have realized, “I can look like myself 15 years ago and not have to look like a circus freak for it.” It’s become very digestible for patients. Social media is a huge driver behind it. Well, that, and the techniques are better.
So what’s actually new or changing about facelifts?
Dr. Mark Mani: We call it the golden age of facelift surgery. It’s primarily because of the success of the deep plane facelift.
Dr. David Shafer: There’s nothing new about [the deep plane facelift] as a procedure. It’s just very sophisticated marketing that’s being done now, and there are refinements to the procedures. But it’s not some plastic surgeon who’s marketing it now as some magic procedure that he came up with that nobody else does.
Mani: [A version of] the first deep plane lifts was performed in the late 1960s by a surgeon named Tord Skoog in Sweden [though the name came later]. I have his textbook and can show you results that would stand up to the best deep plane surgeons today. It’s not the procedure, it’s the surgeon, and facelift surgery, among all surgeries in plastic surgery, is an art form.
Afrooz: A surgeon named Sam Hamra — he just passed, but a wonderful human being, an extraordinary thinker, an extraordinary surgeon — first coined the phrase “deep plane facelift” in a 1990 paper and laid out some building blocks of the procedure. Just like everything else in plastic surgery, we stand on the giants before us.
Dr. Michael Stein: There are two main facelift techniques: deep plane and SMAS plication. The deep plane facelift is where you cut the layer under the skin called the SMAS, dissect underneath it, and tighten it in addition to the skin. In the SMAS facelift, instead of cutting and elevating the SMAS, you suture it to itself to tighten it from over top.
Dr. Amir Karam: The majority of surgeons, up until recently, have been doing the traditional SMAS technique, which is more or less horizontally pulling the face sideways, and that was leading to a very unnatural look.
Mani: I was the surgeon who wrote the most-read facelift academic article that convinced other surgeons to do deep plane facelifts. It was an article in Aesthetic Surgery Journal in 2016, where I detailed the specific anatomic reasons that deep plane is better.
Stein: The people who only do deep plane facelifts say they have a more longitudinal result, and vice versa. But the truth is, a good result is a good result. It depends more on the surgeon versus technique. A good facelift is a good facelift.
by Bustle Editors, Bustle | Read more:
Image: uncredited
