Should I Get A Face Lift Or A Brow Lift?

Your face. It’s the one thing you can’t hide, the thing that makes you you. So many patients come to us with insecurities about their face, whether it’s sagging skin, wrinkles, or other imperfections that have resulted from the body’s natural aging process. They want to regain their confidence, achieve a more youthful glow, and find a way to put their best face forward. For many of these patients, the question comes down to whether a brow lift or a face lift will better help them accomplish their goals.

While both brow lifts and face lifts can be very helpful in attaining a smooth, youthful face, it’s important to examine the differences between the two surgeries and their different effects on parts of the face before deciding which procedure is right for you! Today we’ll walk you through how a face lift works, how a brow lift works, and which procedure is best based on your problem areas and aesthetic goals.

What is a Face Lift?

The technical term for a face lift is a rhytidectomy. This procedure is the most complex approach for correcting sagging skin and wrinkles. During the procedure, excess skin is removed, muscles and tissues are tightened, and skin is adjusted to reveal a youthful face and neck. A face lift addresses many areas of the face: deep creases in the lower eyelids, deep creases along the nose, mid-face sagging, and the excess skin underneath the chin.

There are three different types of face-lift procedures that you can get, and they vary based on the incision technique. Our board certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Z, will help you chose which is right for you based on your specific face and needs. However, in all of the face lift procedures, an incision will be made around your ears and the size of the incision depends upon the extensiveness of the procedure. Here are the three types of face lifts:

Traditional Face Lift

The incision from a traditional face-lift starts at the base of your temples and runs behind your ears to your lower hairline.

Limited Incision Face Lift

As the name suggests, the incisions in this procedure are smaller. They are a series of short incisions along the same pathway as the traditional face-lift.

Neck Lift

The incisions for a neck lift begin at the front of the ears, then go around the back, and into the lower hairline.

What Is A Brow Lift?

As you age, wrinkles may begin to form that affect the appearance of your face, and the most common place for these wrinkles to form is the forehead region. These unwanted wrinkles might make a person look older, angry, stressed or generally unhappy. The brow lift is a cosmetic procedure that aims to smooth these wrinkles by repositioning the eyebrows higher on the face. As with the face lift, there are three different brow lift procedures involving three different types of incisions.

Open Brow-Lift

This technique involves one long incision that is typically hidden in the patient’s hairline. The muscles of the face are then loosened, and excess fat is removed.

Limited Incision Technique

This procedure targets wrinkles around the eyes rather than on the center of the forehead. The incision for this procedure is also hidden from plain sight in the patient’s hairline.

Endoscopic Brow-Lift

This is the least invasive form of brow-lift surgery. It is performed through a series of short incisions along the hairline. The surgeon will then use thin instruments and a camera to reposition and lift tissue in the forehead, while also removing any excess fat.

Should I Get A Face Lift Or Brow Lift?

The answer to this question depends on what your plastic surgeon recommends and what you are looking for out of your surgery. Both procedures help to reveal a fresher, more youthful face and many patients are happy with both procedures. However, if you experience mid-face sagging, deep creases along the eyelid, nose, and mouth, hanging skin under your chin, or drooping skin then a face lift may be right for you. If you have problems with the wrinkles in between your eyebrows or across the forehead, heavy upper eyelids, or drooping eyebrows then the brow lift may be right for you.

Either way, both of these procedures are great ways to get rid of unwanted signs of aging along with any social anxiety that these issues may be causing. Schedule a consultation today to speak with our trained plastic surgeon, Dr. Z, to find out which procedure best suits your individual needs as a patient.