face-lift

While less invasive techniques (botulinum toxin, filling products) and superficial techniques (peeling) are more suitable for wrinkle treatment, surgery generally provides the most efficient treatment of skin folds and sagging tissue.
Lifting techniques are based on skin undermining, repositioning of deeper tissues that are sagging, and removal of excess skin where the scars are difficult to see (e.g. around the ear or in the hear-bearing scalp). In endoscopic procedures even deeper soft tisues are released and repositioned through small stab incisions.
A face-lift does not necessarily require general anaesthesia. Some limited and still efficient variations of this operation can be performed under local anaesthesia (cheek-lift through lower lid incision, mini-lift, MACS-lift, S-lift, ...). The bigger operations, inluding the endoscopic techniques, are extensive procedures. They cause important swelling for several weeks. Complete softening of the tissues and the evolution to a completely natural result can take several months.

Endoscopic forehead-lift:
Under deep sedation or general anaesthesia the soft tissues of the forehead and the sagging eyebrows are lifted. Most often this is an endoscopic procedure: the lifted tissues do not cause skin folding in the scalp. The scars are five lines of six to twelve millimetres in the hair-bearing scalp. For patients with a high hair line skin excision may be required. Then the scar is placed at the hair line.

Endoscopic face-lift:
Ageing makes the fat over the cheekbones slide downwards to form the nasolabial folds (the folds between the nose and the angles of the mouth). These tissues are repositioned through a 3 cm incision in the hair-bearing skin of the temples, an incision in the "crow's foot" and a third incision in the mouth in the fold between the upper lip and the jaw. This procedure also supports the lower eyelids. Further eyelid correction can be combined with this procedure.

Face-lift, mini-lift: For folds on the lower part of the cheeks and over the border of the jaw, a limited version of the "classical" face-lift incision is used. It starts in the hair bearing skin just above the ear, follows the anterior border of the ear, disappears after the tragus (the small valve in front of the ear) to reappear at the earlobe. Only in more extensive corrections, or when a neck-lift is performed at the same time, the incision continues in the fold behind the ear upwards into the scalp.