Plastic Surgery Can Lift Jowls, Jaw Line

Plastic surgery can do the jowls good – lifting that pesky area in the lower cheeks that sags with age. But, picking the wrong surgeon can lead to permanent scars.

The jowl – that area in the lower cheek that can become fleshy or sag with time – is a tell-tale sign of age as it starts to droop…and a major target for people who want to turn back their facial clocks.

“They’ll say, ‘I don’t mind being 50 or 45, but I don’t want to be 45 with jowls,’” explains Rhode Island plastic surgeon Dr. Patrick Sullivan.

If the surgeon doesn’t take sufficient caution, however, a patient can undergo a jowl operation and walk away with scars. Sullivan cited a woman in her late forties who came to him in hopes of undoing the damage done by an apparently unqualified surgeon that left her with permanent scars on her face and neck.

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“What you have to do is make sure that you have a very good surgeon to take care of a problem like this,” he says.

As people age, the jowl areas can deflate and make their chin look bigger. Jowls can be removed or contoured, and Dr. Sullivan performs many operations that are lifting procedures done in layers rather than simply a quick stretching of the skin. Also, to provide a smooth jaw line after the lift, surgeons can employ a fat grafting procedure, using the patient’s own fat tissue from another nearby area to contour the mandible area.

“We give them a nice jaw line with their own fat rather than…something synthetic,” he says. Dr. Sullivan adds that using the patient’s own fat reduces the chance of infection and greatly increases the likelihood that the transplanted tissue will survive. At the same time, to produce the desired final result may require liposuction to get rid of excess fat.