Neck Lift Surgery – What is it. Mr Adrian Richards of Aurora Clinics describes the Neck Lift Procedure and who is suitable for it. Mr Richards has voted best Plastic & Comsetis Surgeon by the Daily Mail. For more information or should you wish to book a FREE Consultation with our specialist plastic surgeon, please call us on 01844 214362.

Neck Lift Surgery – What Is It

Hello, my name is Adrian Richards. I’m the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics. My background is I’m a plastic surgeon. I tend to specialise in cosmetic surgery nowadays. Now I talked in other videos about face lifts and there’s an awful lot of difficulty. I talk to a lot of people, and they find it very difficult to tell the difference between short scar, long scar, traditional face lifts, neck lifts, SMAS lifts, S-lifts, deep plane face lifts. Very, very complicated, okay? Basically it’s not that complicated. It’s just a lot of long words used to describe these techniques.

So what I’m going to talk about today is a neck lift, okay? So normally when people talk about a face lift, there is some elevation of the neck, and it should really be called a face and neck lift, Okay? So if you lift the neck you will, because you don’t want to leave a pleat here, you have to lift the face to a certain amount. So maybe a better term is a lower face lift, which includes the neck.

Okay. What problems do you get with the neck? Well, as you get older with gravity, the tissues in the neck tend to loosen. You develop jowls along the jaw line and loosening in the skin particularly in the central part of the neck, and you tend to lose your definition between this, this is the mental cervical angle. So the mental is the chin, cervical is the neck, and this angle should be nice and tight. But with time, as the skin loosens, it loses its angle, and you can also get what we call prominences of the platysma. So the platysma is the muscle of the neck. When you contract that, I don’t know if you can see, can you see you get a band in the neck like that. I’ve got one on that side, and that’s basically the muscle of the neck contracting. Okay?

So if you’re concerned about the neck, you need to consider the only real way of tightening it up is by some form of surgery, which is normally performed by an operation principally designed to tighten up the skin of the neck. Now I’m going to talk about that operation in another video, but essentially most techniques involve an incision in front of the ear and then extend it in the fold behind the ear and then back in the hairline. That allows access to the neck where we can tighten up the muscles and tighten up the skin, and normally sort of two to three cm of skin is removed in that area to tighten up the skin of the neck.

In some cases some surgeons will also do what is called a submental incision, which is an incision in the fold underneath here, underneath the chin. So you’ve got a natural fold there. An incision is made in there and that allows us to access the muscles. That’s the platysmal muscle, and I’ve got a particularly bad one here. So the surgeon will visualize that and remove bits of it or we can sew the muscles together. So by dual access from the sides, this little incision here, we can see the whole neck, tighten up the muscles, tighten up the skin, and that gives us much better control of the neck rather than just a lateral incision.

So really with any form of facial surgery, the best technique really needs to be tailored to the individual. So a younger patient, without neck laxity, midface descent, often a MACS face lift is suitable. With neck problems, it really depends on what the issue is. If we have got platysmal bands, if we have got a lot of loose skin in the central area, we need to consider a lateral lift and possibly a submental incision, which is normally very well hidden, to give us direct access to the muscle so we can deal with that.

So I hope that’s clarified some of the issues. I’ll be talking in other videos about other techniques, SMAS face lifts, deep plane face lifts to try and clarify those for you. If you have any questions or queries from the video, please contact us either by ringing us on 01844 214362 or by e-mailing us at the Aurora-Clinics website. Thanks for watching.