If what you see in the mirror is a face that's more "mature" than you'd like, you may have been thinking about having a little something done. But "a little something" might not get you the look you want. A study done at the University of Toronto reported that plastic surgery patients who had not one, not two, but three procedures appeared the youngest. A panel rated before and after pictures of the patients and estimated their ages. The study participants who had a face and neck lift, an eye tuck, and a forehead lift were judged to be 8.41 years younger postoperatively. Patients who only had a face and neck lift seemed 5.74 years younger and those who had a face and neck lift plus one other surgery looked as though they had subtracted 7.51 years.
The research was published online in Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery. In their conclusion, the investigators wrote: "Our study is novel in that it quantifies the degree of perceived age change after aging face surgical procedures and demonstrates a significant and consistent reduction in perceived age after aesthetic facial surgery. This effect is more substantial when the number of surgical procedures is increased, an effect unrelated to the preoperative age of a patient and unaffected by other variables that we investigated."
Lead author Nitin Chauhan, MD and colleagues noted that although previous studies have relied on outcomes reported by the patients themselves, the objective opinion of others is a better measure of success.
