Hello my name's Adrian Richards I'm a Plastic and Cosmetic Surgeon and I'm the Surgical Director of Aurora Clinics and today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how the face ages. So we all know when we see a face we know roughly what age it is, plus or minus four or five years normally, but I find that women are actually much better at aging faces than men. So if you have lived an unhealthy lifestyle and you smoke and haven't been eating vegetables and enough fluid you might look slightly older than your chronological age, and if you've looked after yourself you may look slightly better, but essentially facial aging does occur to everyone.

Okay, so what are the four main areas of facial aging? Well the important things to think about, and you are doing this when you look at a face without knowing it you are looking at these four issues. The first one is gravitational changes, and this is basically because we walk upright, the soft tissues of the face are subject to gravity so you will get descent of the facial issue which is characterised by elongation of the lower eyelid. So in youth the lower eyelid looks very short with a nice smooth curve up to the eyelid, but as we age the cheek tissue goes down slightly and the lower eyelids look longer. They aren't actually longer but because the cheek's gone down slightly they look longer.

We also get slight gel formation in this area and also as the cheek goes down we get formation of nasal labial lines which come down from the corner of the nose to the corner of the mouth, and we also get gravitational changes to the neck and the skin becomes looser. So normal gravitational changes are best treated with surgery. So surgery tightens up the skin so loose skin, gravitational changes, best treated with surgery.

The other three main topics which often we don't concentrate on enough are the condition of the skin, the active lines in the face and volume loss. So volume loss is very important and often under-estimated, but as we get older we lose volume from the face, so we lose the padding underneath the skin. So youthful faces, children's faces, faces in their 20s are very smooth, they're very full, very smooth sort of curves, not a lot of shadowing. As we get older we lose volume from around the eyes and particularly from around the mouth, so we lose volume from there and it gives us a very characteristic appearance. So the way this is treated is normally by volume restoration which can either be done by moving the tissues, adding other tissues such as fat, or by treatments which I'm going to talk about in other videos such as Sculptra or Dermal Fillers, and these rejuvenate the face by basically plumping it up and restoring volume.

The other areas which are aging to the face are active lines, and these are caused by muscle activity, so they typically occur between the eyebrows, in the forehead and the crows feet area, and the muscles basically cause the skin to fold, so children can frown, but because they haven't been frowning for very long and the skin's very plastic, when they don't frown they wont have any residual lines. But as we get older, it's a bit like folding a piece of paper repeatedly, the lines get sort of set in the skin, and as I said they typically occur frown, across the forehead and in the crows feet area, and these lines are best treated with Botox therapy because surgery wont affect facial movement and those active lines will still be there, and filler treatment can help disguise the lines slightly by still being able to frown, so if the lines are caused by muscle activity they need to be treated by selectively reducing that hyperkinetic or over muscle activity.

And the fourth aspect of facial aging which is very important, and again overlooked, is quality of the skin. So we know, when I do course I show people pictures of the skin and you can very accurately assess someone's age really from the quality of the skin. So we'll talk about this in other videos but the important things to sort of take home from this video are that you need to protect your skin from sun, the ultraviolet radiation, even in England where it doesn't seem very sunny, you need to protect your skin because you're still getting ultraviolet skin damage, and use very good skin treatments under medical supervision.

So just to summarise, the four areas of facial aging which are important. Gravitation changes, active lines caused by muscle activity which is best treated with muscle relaxing injections, gravitational changes are best treated with surgery, skin, we need to be prophylactic with that so we need to look after our skin, and if there is some damage treat it, and the final aspect is volume loss which we need to treat with volume restoration.

So I hope that's been helpful. We discuss each of these issues in separate videos which might be useful to have a look at. Thank you very much for watching the video, if you'd like any more information about any aspect of facial aging or any aspect of cosmetic surgery please contact us either via the Aurora-Clinic website or alternatively ring us in the office on 01844 214 362. Thank you very much.

Keywords: acne treatment, botox clinic, chemical peels, dermal fillers, fine line treatment

About the Author
Adrian Richards,
adrian.richards2@googlemail.com
Learn more about acne treatment, botox clinic
Adrian Richards is a consultant plastic surgeon works with Aurora Clinics. For more information on Tummy Tuck Milton Keynes, Cosmetic Surgery and Neck Lift Surgery he recommends you to visit http://www.aurora-clinics.co.uk/

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