In the previous post, I introduced the most important principle in facelift surgery.
When doing any kind of work, the part I value most is being open to honest feedback
even when it can be painful at times.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because an acquaintance of mine read the post and, as expected, said:
“Dr. Heo, who do you think is actually curious about this kind of thing?”“Women aren’t interested in your surgical principles.What they care about is whether getting a nose job will make them look like Scarlett Johansson, whether contouring surgery will turn them into Margot Robbie, or whether a facelift will make them look twenty years younger. That’s all they’re interested in they don’t care about your principles at all!”
That was the feedback I received.
Yes… it seems I had been writing under what you might call the curse of knowledge.
Of course, I will continue to write the kind of articles I personally want to share.
But as I mentioned earlier, it’s also important to listen to feedback from readers.
So today, I’d like to talk about something many of you are probably more curious about:
How can you tell whether you are a good candidate for wrinkle correction, a facelift, or lifting procedures?
In other words,
Do I have the kind of facial features that would benefit the most from a facelift?
Today, we’ll go over the types of facial characteristics that tend to achieve the highest satisfaction after facelift surgery.
A long time ago, I once studied sculpture.
More specifically, I practiced creating human head models using clay, a common exercise in entrance exams for art schools.
The process involves adding clay, removing it, and carving it away to gradually shape the structure of a face.
In other words, the face is not something that simply appears all at once. It is something that emerges through careful adjustment of volume and contour.
(Looking back now, I realize I was already working with wrinkles even back then. )
At the time, I was still a very junior plastic surgeon, but I had always taken some pride in my own sense of aesthetics. Still, I found myself discouraged by the clear difference in skill between my sculpture instructor and me.
(Since then, I’ve developed a deep respect for the level of anatomical understanding that artists have.)
My instructor would casually add some clay here, smooth a little there, remove a bit elsewhere and somehow, a human face would begin to appear.
Meanwhile, no matter how many times I added clay, removed it, or reshaped everything from scratch, I just couldn’t recreate the same feeling his work had.
And then, at one point, he said something that stayed with me.
“Can you see the eyes, the nose, and the mouth hidden inside this block of clay?Just remove what is covering them, and add a little where something is missing.”
Back then, I had no idea what he was talking about.
At the time, I didn’t really understand what he meant.
But when someone is that skilled, it’s hard to argue with them.
(Still, I’m certain that experience turned out to be an excellent way to develop a sense of aesthetics.)
As time passed, that memory came back to me again while I was deeply focused on eyelid surgery. Back then, there was a senior surgeon I learned a great deal from, someone who was exceptionally skilled at eyelid procedures.
One day, during a meal together, he said something that stayed with me.
“It’s not that I’m especially good at surgery. There are people who are already naturally beautiful, but their features just happen to be hidden.All I do is bring out the eyes and the nose that were already there, buried beneath the surface.”
At the time, I just thought he was being modest. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I remember thinking,
“Maybe when you become truly experienced, you start to see things others don’t.”
The last time these two memories came back to me was when I had already become a surgeon specializing in facelift procedures and was deeply immersed in my surgical work.
As I continued meeting patients in consultation, at some point, I began to notice something different. I started to see younger, more beautiful faces hidden beneath the wrinkles.
For example, when I met women in their 40s who had undergone facial contouring surgery and developed heaviness around the corners of the mouth from redundant skin descending into what we often call the “bulldog” area, it became clear to me that simply adjusting that lower facial skin could make them look youthful enough to draw admiration from their peers.
And when I met men in their 40s and 50s with prominent lower eyelid fat bulging forward, I could already see that with just a modest correction of the protruding fat and lax skin, they could easily maintain a youthful appearance for the next twenty years of their professional lives.
There were also patients whose skin naturally lacked structural firmness and seemed to sag more noticeably with each passing year. Ironically, they were often the ones who could achieve the most dramatic improvement and potentially slow the visible progression of aging the most if treated at the right time.
These were the kinds of thoughts that gradually began to occur to me during consultations.
So, as someone who writes a blog focused on facelift surgery, I thought it would be helpful to organize the types of facial features that tend to benefit the most from a facelift. There’s still a long way to go. I have so much more I’d like to share,
so I’ll go through them one by one in the next article.
