SmartFem expert on plastic surgery Dr. Rick Brown presents a series of articles on what’s new and hot in plastic surgery. Part one of the series of focuses on the facts and fictions surrounding the latest plastic surgery trends.
With all the talk about plastic surgery on the radio, TV, and from your best friend, it is hard to ignore the newest trends or buzzwords surrounding the topic. What is everyone 
talking about? What’s up with the “Vampire Facelift”? Can Cool Sculpting or Ulthera be alternatives to traditional liposuction, face and neck lifts? It seems nowadays that new, improved, better AND longer lasting procedures are popping up to lure us into the ever-flowing fountain of youth.
In the first part of the series, Dr. Rick Brown separates fact and fiction from some of the more popular trending procedures.
Vampire Facelift vs. Traditional Facelift
A new cosmetic procedure called the vampire facelift, actually uses a patients own blood, re-injected into the face. The technology called Selphyl, is a non-surgical procedure, much like facial fillers. It is prepared by drawing a patient’s blood, separating the platelets from the red blood cells, blending the platelets with a fibrin mixture and injecting it to the area a patient wants to augment. Additionally, you overfill the area by 20 percent so that a person sees an approxi
mation of the final results, but it’s slightly bigger than it will actually be. And then, in about a day, the excess is gone, and several weeks later, the fibrin matrix builds up, yielding the final result.
But calling this a facelift is inaccurate. The reality is that with age, skin begins to sag and so do the deeper facial structures. While injecting ones own blood products does introduce a rich amount of stem cells, it will not tighten the facial structures in the same way that plastic surgery will. Just like everything else we do, in the right patient it may work well, the patient who has good quality skin with minimal sagging to the skin and the facial structures. These are the patients that are also good candidates for traditional fillers to temporize facial youth until the laxity in the skin and face sets in. So, in the right patient a “vampire facelift” may be appropriate in that it is basically a filler. But for most patients a traditional facelift still may be the best option. An in office evaluation is the only way to find out.
Dr. Rick Brown is a leading Plastic Surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona. He could be reached at 480-947-2455.
