Mr Richards is the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics and a well known plastic and cosmetic surgeon based in the UK. In this video, he takes you through a Live  traditional Facelift surgical procedure step by step and gives valuable information on this procedure for patients considering this type of treatment as well as for Medical professionals looking to improve their technique. For more information or to schedule a FREE consultation, please call us on 01844 214362.

Face Lift – A Traditional Face Lift

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a consultant plastic surgeon based here in the United Kingdom, and I’m also the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics. Today I’m going to be talking you through an operation I recently performed on a lady which was a traditional type face lift with an incision behind the ear.

Here you can see me just marking where I’m going to place my incisions in front of the ear and now behind the ear. This is just in the fold behind the ear, and now I’m extending this down onto the junction of the hair and the normal skin in the neck.

So I’m making my incisions now, and this one’s going to be hidden within the scalp hair, so it’ll be very difficult to see, as I’ll show you later. My next stage is just to make an incision in front of the ear here, following the natural curves of the ear so the scar will be well-concealed.

I’ll then go behind the ear. This is my sulcus incision in the fold behind the ear, and then I extend down onto the hair bearing skin here, nice and gently cutting through the skin.

I’ll elevate the skin off the deeper tissue, which I’m doing here by sharp dissection with a scalpel. Here you can see a vein which I’ve preserved. Same sort of technique in the cheek area. I’m gently freeing up the skin from the underlying SMAS tissue. That’s the S-M-A-S tissue which you may have heard about.

Here I am just creating some tunnels, slightly more anteriorly, just to complete my dissection anteriorly.

The next stage is to free up the skin from the back of the ear here. You can see now I’ve got a good dissection really right down into the neck where I can see the muscle. And here I’m just showing the SMAS layer.

I’d like to tighten this whole area up with permanent stitches. Here you can see I’m tightening the platysma muscle in the neck, and I secure that back here to the firm fascia here so I’ve got good, secure fixation of this tissue which will give me a long-term improvement in the soft tissue of the face.

Here I am just putting my stitches in to control the jowl. This is the jowl control stitch, which again I will secure to solid fascia just above the ear in the temple area. This deep fixation allows me to remove the skin.

I’m just showing you here the skin I’m going to remove. I tend to remove in the temple three to four centimetres of skin in a vertical direction and behind the ear, again three to four centimetres behind the ear in this region. This will give me good elevation of the neck tissue. You can see me just lifting up here. This is the skin I’m going to remove in this region.

The next stage is to remove the skin. You can see I’m doing that here with my very sharp special scissors. This incision will hug the contours of the ear. This is the skin I’ve removed behind the ear, and it’s been closed with absorbable stitches.

Here I am just showing the skin I’ve removed. This is just before my final closure. I’ve put some deep stitches in here, and this is the appearance ten days following the operation when the stitches have been removed. As you can see, the incision hugs nicely the contour of the ear and is difficult to see.

Thank you for watching this video. If you’d like any information on this procedure or indeed any other cosmetic procedure, please contact us either via the website or by phoning us on a UK number 01844 214362. Thank you very much.