subject: More Than Gravity To Blame For Facial Aging [print this page] The face is a much more complex structure than it is previously thought to be, a recent study says. It is also not uniformly affected by gravity, but rather each part reacts to gravity differently over time.
According to a surgeon, the human face does not age uniformly. The popular belief is that it is a connected mass, which gets weighed down by gravity, creating a sagging skin. But, the study says that the face is made up of individual fat compartments that lose and gain fat at different rates.
The study also reveals that the facial fat is grouped into different areas like the eyes, forehead, cheeks, and the mouth. With time, volume changes and shifts in position happen not to all the groups simultaneously, but to each group. This way, the tissue compartments change at different paces. As this process will not be in sync with change in other groups, the result can be sagging skin and wrinkles.
Plastic surgeons find these results very encouraging. They say that the findings would enable us to view aging and the way we approach facial reconstructive surgery in a very different way. Already, these findings have implications for the use of injectable fillers and in helping cancer and trauma patients more effectively by understanding the blood flow within each unit. Plastic surgeons also hope the results can help them find better ways to treat facial deformities like cleft lips.
The study may also have basic applications in traditional plastic surgeries like facelifts, brow lifts, and eyelid lifts. Each of these operations is aimed at improving the look of a specific part of the face. The understanding that the nearby regions would react differently after the surgery may help surgeons determine new techniques to craft results that can last longer.
A facelift, for example, involves making a tiny incision in the hairline, loosening the skin from several of the facial fat compartments and readjusting tissues underneath, stretching the skin upward, removing the excess, and closing the incision. The study's results might give more insight into reshaping and filling certain facial parts during the facelift procedure.
Similar things might be true of brow lifts and eyelid lifts. Brow lifts concentrate just on smoothing out the forehead skin. Perhaps, the knowledge about the method in which the surrounding tissues respond to the procedure might change the exact way that a brow lift is performed. Eyelid lifts aim to decrease droopy top lids or bagging lower lids. But, perhaps the results could be improved much more by an understanding of how the surrounding tissues shift and change.
The discovery of distinct facial fat compartments is a great breakthrough for the plastic surgery world and is just one of the many exciting studies to have come out in recent years. The nature of plastic surgery will continue to adapt and change based on such helpful information.
