What makes someone a Candidate for a Mini-liftContoura Facial Plastic Surgery

TRANSCRIPTION

Hi, I'm Dr. Garcia again. And I was a recently asked, what makes a good candidate for a mini lift? First of all, we get to the part of the emotional need of the patient and that really becomes evident when a patient has seen their face repeatedly in the mirror and they know that they want to change something and it really comes down to looking at the effects of aging in the midface. Now, keep in mind the difference between a face lift and a mini lift is all about the regionality of the procedure. For instance, a mini lift generally entails two parts of the face that are being lifted, either the brow or the mid face or the mid face and the neck. Whereas a facelift usually encompasses all three areas of the face that are being treated.

Now, having said that, there's three major components to the aging process and in my book and on our website, we go in those into a little bit deeper discussion. But for sake of brevity, I will discuss mostly the gravitational component, which is the part of the aging process that the mini lift would address. Now what you're looking at is two different types of dissension and gravitational changes to the face. First, in the mid face you're seeing a down and in drop of the face that's fallen towards the outer parts of the mouth, but stopping at a vertical line from the corners of the mouth downward. And so as that tissue begins to drop down and in, it'll stop and then it begins to fall down and it creates the jowls. The term jowl is Latin for broken jaw line because if you look at your profile or the angle or the oblique angle of the face, you'll see that it actually looks like there's a step off and a break in the jaw line.

And so the treatment is always going opposite to the effects of aging, right? So we are treating this mid facial descent in an opposite direction. So we're lifting up and out. And so the neck is a little bit of a different change and what you're seeing there is bands in the neck that have developed and these are a result of a muscle that was once together that pulled apart. And so now you have these two identifiable bands. And so what we're doing is we're suturing those back together and redraping the neck in a little bit of a different vector of lift. And so the mini lift really entails a very similar procedure to the facelift in terms of what we're doing underneath the skin and the musculature and mobilizing and moving fat and muscle into the correct place, but it all has to do with the regionality. So if we're doing more areas of the face, we generally will call it a face lift and if we're doing less then we start confining our nomenclature and changing it.

So there's not much of a difference between the mini lift and say the contour lift. The contour lift just happens to be a procedure that I developed that's a spin off of the mini lift, but not much of a change. It's just my own proprietary technique. But yeah, any person who has issues of aging within the jaw line, in the neck, or even in the upper third of the face and the brow area, becomes a suitable candidate for a mini lift. So log onto our website, see a little bit more before and after pictures, and there's a little bit more detailed explanation of the procedure. I do have some schematic videos that show the lifting techniques and how we do it. And I welcome you as always, to come in for a consultation and see us should you have any further questions. So I really look forward to seeing you and thank you so much for checking in. Have a good day.