Dr. Salemy had the honor of chatting with Dr. Barry Lycka, MD, host of Inside Cosmetic Surgery Today, on trends in Facial Rejuvenation and Face Lift Surgery. Below is an excerpt from the interview where Dr. Salemy discusses how modern day facial surgery focuses on restoring youth by redefining neck & jawlines and adding volume to the face.
Dr. Lycka: Today we have a very special guest by the name of Dr. Salemy from the State of Washington. He practices in Seattle and he is a plastic surgeon that has a wealth of information. Today we’re going to talk about facial rejuvenation.
The topic of facial rejuvenation is something that’s very, very common these days and it’s one of the [top] cosmetic surgery procedures done in the world.
Now, what do you look for when you’re looking at a face that’s getting older? What are the number one things that you look for?
Dr. Salemy: Well, that’s a good question Dr. Lycka and what I typically see is women coming in who are interested in getting a little bit more of a youthful appearance back to her face. Typically the things that we’re looking at are neck line definition, jaw line definition and replacing fullness or what we call volume back to the parts of the face that have lost it due to time and age and gravity and all of the rest of it. So, we’re really trying to look at the face not just as a whole picture but also divide it into different parts and see what areas of concern of the patient we can offer options to improve and still really maintain a very nice natural appearance.
Dr. Lycka: Okay, so a person comes to you, they’re in their 30’s. What’s the first things that start going wrong as they start getting older?
Dr. Salemy: That’s a good question. It’s a combination of things. It’s usually loss of skin elasticity and also loss of skin thickness. There is loss of jaw line and neckline definition. You start to see some early signs of jowling. When you look right at the jaw line ideally we like the jaw line to look kind of like a V and then as we get older it starts to look more like a W where the jowls start to really come down. We also start to see loss of volume in places where we used to have it so in particular over the cheeks or the mid-face, we start to see a loss of line there and then some banding of the neck.
Those are sort of the classic early signs of facial aging and they start anywhere from sometimes in the 30’s but usually more typically in the 40’s or so.
Dr. Lycka: Okay, so let’s go on that spectrum of aging because you see people when they’re young, you see people when they’re old. Now a person comes in and they’re 50. What do you look for in signs of aging there?
Dr. Salemy: It’s the same signs it just depends on a number of factors as to how severe it is. Some of it is ethnicity, some of it is how well they’ve taken care of themselves over the course of their life with good health, weight maintenance, nutrition, avoiding a lot of sun damage, that really – I think the sun damage is something that really can cause premature signs of aging.
It’s really a question of how bad is the problem both just from a purely anatomic standpoint but also in terms of how much is from the patient and then how much we can improve it with our surgical techniques, how much of an improvement can we get while still maintaining a really nice natural appearance for the patients face.
Dr. Lycka: Yeah, and that’s the whole thing. I think the whole thing in a nutshell, in this day and age, is we’re trying to leave a natural appearance but we’re not trying to make a person look really abnormal. We’re trying to enhance what they have rather than really make them look bizarre.
Dr. Salemy: That’s exactly right and I think that’s really sort of the ideas on the thoughts on how to make the face look better has really changed over the last 10, 15, 20 years where it used to be just about pulling skin and removing excess skin and now it’s kind of – there is some of that obviously but it’s also redefining jaw line and neck line definition and the big thing that we’re doing more and more of I think is adding volume to the face, in particular, fullness into the cheeks.
