A fresh crop of facelift patients is seeking beauty not youth—and redefining the century-old plastic surgery procedure in the process.
Nose jobs, breast augmentations, liposuction—plenty of plastic surgery procedures exist purely to enhance the human form. Often the objective is not to reconstruct or crank back the clock, but simply to beautify by amending the raw materials. Then there’s the facelift, which has been forever and firmly regarded as a rejuvenation operation—a sort of last resort, reserved for those struggling to identify with aging reflections. But lately, with celebrity glow-ups spurring constant speculation and the virtues of the deep plane facelift going viral, some surgeons are reporting a shift in the way the public views the veteran procedure. For a new wave of patients, the goal of a facelift is not to reclaim a former face, but to design a face that’s more beautiful than any previous iteration. Beyond merely repositioning tissues, this version of the facelift fine-tunes features, creates symmetry where it’s lacking, and softens transitions (from chin to jaw, for example) to enhance proportion and shape.
