Lifestyle Lift vs. Quick Lift

Given the overwhelmingly negative blogs and comments on this website alone why patients are still undergoing and contemplating these mini-lifts, including the two procedures described above?

What is the advantage of making all the incisions of a real facelift but just performing small undermining?  You can see by the posts it is not scarring.  Closing incisions under tension causes pressure on the incisions to open up or widen.  Wide hypertrophic scars tend to be unsightly, depigment, and itch, all common complaints on the message boards. 

Judging from the posts, it is not better results either, since the amount of pulling to correct jowling is less with a minilift than with a real facelift.  Many of the posts reflect inadequate or disappointing rejuvenation.

Minilifts are definitely cheaper, because they are often marketed and performed under local anesthesia and entail much less surgery than a real facelift.  Many of the posts reflect a considerably painful experience during the surgery.  Any surgery, inncluding real facelifts, can be performed under local anesthesia with sedation.  It is not always the most comfortable option, but it can certainly be done.

Are there many very happy LSL patients out there?  Perhaps.  But the LSL patients I have seen in my practice have been uniformly unhappy and have had unsatisfactory and sometimes incredible scarring.  In all fairness maybe only unhappy patients seek our office out because our most common procedure is revision facelifts.  However judging from the posts that is not the case either, since most patients posting on this board were unhappy with their LSL lifts.

I have several posts on this website on this topic, so I won't belabor the point.  I would advise patients who think they are going to get a $20,000 facelift for $5000 to research further and read the comments posted by actual patients carefully. 

The good news for unhappy LSL patients is that these procedures can usually be revised and converted to real facelifts by sugeons skilled in the techniques of revision facelifts.

Buyer beware: a number of ‘limited incision’ and ‘quick recovery’ facelift procedures are currently marketed to patients with names like “The Quicklift”, “The Lifestyle Lift”, “The Weekend Facelift”, “The S Lift”, “The MACS Lift”, etc.  As with most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.  In my opinion, the results of surgery are in direct proportion to the time and effort that the surgeon has put into the procedure.  Most of the procedures I have listed above cut corners to arrive at a shorter surgical time and quicker recovery (which, by the way, isn’t always the case), and most of them undertreat or do not at all improve the neck.  Additionally, ‘cutting corners’ in the neck almost always leads to distortion of the neck area skin, which often is quite readily apparent in ‘before and after’ images of these procedures with gimmicky names.  Look for abnormal and unnatural-appearing skin tension lines in the lateral neck as well as below and behind the ears.