08/10/2025
My thoughts on complex facial aesthetic surgery in this weekend’s
The cost of surgery is a nuanced topic because patient anatomy, complexity, and desires vary significantly. Ultimately, a specific and customized surgical plan is needed. The colloquial term “facelift” is often used imprecisely, aggregating together 10-15 specific individual procedures such as upper and lower blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery), temporal or coronal brow lift, necklift, autologous fat grafting, midface lift, lower facelift, rhinoplasty, chin implant, buccal fat pad excision, lip lift, canthopexy, and more. The real trend here is not the rising costs of surgery, but rather the desire of more people to treat the face comprehensively rather than piecemeal, and hence to do these procedures simultaneously when applicable.
Facelift surgery commands a high cost because it demands the rare intersection of surgical precision, aesthetic judgment, and artistic vision. The procedure navigates extraordinary anatomic complexity, working through multiple layers of tissue—skin, fat, fascia, muscle, and occasionally bone—each with its own biological behavior and healing profile. Beyond technical skill, it requires a sculptural sensibility to refine proportions, restore harmony, and balance identity with enhanced attractiveness, so the patient still feels entirely like themselves. In the hands of a skilled, experienced, and board-certified plastic surgeon, a facelift is not merely a reversal of aging, but the creation or restoration of beauty itself, sometimes from near scratch, in a way that must withstand both close scrutiny and the passage of time.
