Is There Really a Lunchtime Facelift?

After years of frustrated efforts, new techniques and products have allowed plastic surgeons to deliver noticeable improvements and freshening with little or no downtime.

The "lunchtime facelift" has been the holy grail in plastic surgery for quite a while. The idea of providing facial rejuvenation with no downtime appeals to both plastic surgeons and patients. Get your treatment, look improved and freshened, and immediately go back to work, out on the town or, for some of our entertainment patients here in Beverly Hills, head over to the red carpet at an awards show. Who wouldn't want to get their facial rejuvenation and then have no recovery?

Essentially all of the so called "no downtime facelifts" or "lunchtime facelifts" simply did not live up to their billing. As a plastic surgeon, I know that plastic surgery involves recovery. It is just the way the body responds to a surgical procedure. Traditionally, if the body did not react to the procedure, nothing much was really done and few changes were visible when all was said and done.But now we have many nonsurgical techniques that can create instant facial freshening -- removing or smoothing wrinkles, plumping lips -- with no recovery.

Botox, Restylane, Juvederm, Radiesse, Sculptra and other new products provide facial rejuvenation and do not create scars or undue swelling. They can help achieve that elusive goal of improvements without downtime. This is perhaps the biggest revolution in plastic surgery in thirty years.These products work very differently. When we do Botox in Los Angeles we are using the medicine to paralyze some of the tiny muscles in the face. The twitching of these muscles creates a skin wrinkle on the skin that lies above it. If the muscles lay quietly, they do not tense and cause a wrinkle in the skin above.

Botox is extremely safe, its results are predictable, and it can create fantastic improvements in facial appearance. Certainly this has been my experience as a cosmetic surgeon California. My sister recently had it for the first time, and it dramatically improved and freshened the look of her face – just like I have seen it do for countless other of my patients.The we use skin fillers such as Restylane and Juvederm we work to provide bulk under the skin to fill in wrinkles from below. They are very effective for both small lines and larger ones, such as the nasolabial folds which run from the sides of the nose toward the outside edges of the side of the mouth and the so-called marionette lines that go along the side of the chin.

Each person's face is different, so each person will do best with a different noninvasive treatment and nonsurgical skin rejuvenation. But the various procedures do provide fast changes with little or no recovery. In this respect, they are quite different from surgery such as tummy tuck in California, which does involve some recuperation. Where in the past the “weekend facelift” was illusory, it is now possible to create dramatic changes without downtime.