Genetic Chin & Neck Features
Video transcript: I'm Dr. Buonassisi and I'm a facial plastic and constructive surgeon. Today we're going to talk about face and neck lift surgeries. There are two main groups of patients that I see that are requesting this type of surgery. There are those who have inherited facial features that they'd like to have changed, perhaps a recessive chin or a double chin, and then there are those who have age related changes to their face and neck, which start to occur in patients as they start to get to their 40's and 50's.
When talking about patients in the group where they have inherited facial features which they would like to correct, these are usually changed through procedures that are changed through liposuction or buccal fat removal, also chin augmentation or neck lift. Most of these patients tend to be under the age of 40 and often have these features from the time they were in their late teens.
The other category or group of patients that we see are those who have changes in their neck and face that are age related. In this age group, some of the procedures that we recommend may include an S-lift, or short incision or long incision face lift. This is useful because those procedures actually remove some of the extra skin that occurs as we age. So the big difference between our younger group and our patients that have age related changes is that often there is quite a bit of skin laxity that develops with age and sun exposure. The skin laxity needs to be dealt with usually by removing some of the extra skin.
So what you'll notice on this slide is in the lower half of the slide are procedures we generally do on our younger patients who have inherited facial features. So for example chin augmentation or neck liposuction, and they tend to have shorter recovery periods. In our older patients who have some age related changes we perform some surgeries like short scar or long scar face lift and they have a slightly longer recovery period, and that's what is indicated by the red arrow that goes from left to right.
When I'm consulting patients regarding face and neck lift surgery, I think it's very important to think about the risk reward trade-off. What we want to do is provide the best possible results for our patients with the least risk. So for example in a patient who has a poor neck line simply because of a recessive chin, a simple insertion of a chin implant would be an ideal procedure for them rather than having an extensive neck lift. However, a patient who does not have a recessive chin but has lots of skin laxity in the neck, they get a much better result with a face lift or a full neck lift where you can remove some of that skin and they benefit from a perhaps more lengthy procedure.