Drive-through Face-lifts for Men

So you were just offered a senior discount by a zit-faced-punk working the ticket booth at the movies. Meanwhile, ladies are starting to hold doors for you! It may be time for you to cut some corners to keep ahead of the kids. More and more guys are going under the knife -- in increasingly quicker, cheaper and less invasive ways -- to keep their personal fountains of youth flowing.

“Typically, a patient who comes in for a face-lift is concerned about a sagging around the jaw and neck, and deep smile lines around their lips,” says Dr. Vishal Kapoor, a cosmetic surgeon who specializes in facial surgery, and the medical director of Beverly Hills Cosmetic Plastic Surgery in Los Angeles, Calif. “A mini face-lift can be done in about one and a half hours. It should produce a nice, tight jawline, a softening of the lines around the lips and some improvement of the contour of the neck.”

The Face-lift Procedure
Kapoor performs plastic surgery in his office on an outpatient basis. It’s done using local anesthesia, supplemented by an IV that contains medications for pain, sedation and anxiety. And if you’re in your late 30s or 40s, now is probably the time to get out of the gate and sure up the sags before they become irreversible. “Guys in this age group are good candidates for a mini face-lift,” says Kapoor. “They don’t have quite the degree of facial aging of someone in their 60s, and the small incisions -- typically confined to behind or in front of the ear area -- produce a shorter scar and a quicker recovery time.”

Face-lift Recovery
According to Kapoor, healing tends to be quick (just a day or two). But in reality, everybody experiences different degrees of bruising and swelling. Depending on how comfortable you are, you should be rubbing noses all around town again in six days to a week, at most.

Risks of a Face-lift
“About 3 percent of the time, there is some postoperative bleeding,” warns Kapoor. “Some patients can experience prolonged bruising and injury to some of the motor and sensory nerves, so your smile might look a little off. Or you might experience some numbness around your ears and other parts of your face. That may be permanent -- it’s pretty rare, but it can happen.” But let’s face it, given what you started with, any of that might still be considered an improvement.

Picking a Face-lift Surgeon
Kapoor strongly recommends making sure the doctor you are seeing is a plastic surgeon and is specifically board-certified in plastic surgery. He adds, “There are many plastic surgeons that don’t have a good grasp on how to do face-lift surgery. So you should check that it’s one of their areas of expertise and that they have received the extra training in it.”

Facing the Costs
Kapoor charges $5,500 to $6,500 for a mini face-lift and says that you can expect the results to last about five to seven years. “A lot depends on what degree of aging there was to begin with, how you take care of yourself,” he concludes. “Things like smoking and sun damage contribute to loss of skin elasticity and can affect the results.”

So for those of you who are aging faster than spoiled milk, it’s time pony up the plastic and go … plastic.

Photo: Getty Images