Facelift

The human face is a crystal-clear reflection of inner beauty. Dr. Kristy Hamilton — an elite, board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Houston, Texas — brings her artistry and expertise to the practice of aesthetic enhancement to bring out the unique beauty of each patient. She has a passion for performing modern, cutting-edge facelift surgery – the most powerful form of facial rejuvenation – correcting sagging skin, jowls, and wrinkles to optimize facial proportions, balance, and symmetry. Dr. Hamilton treats the lower face and neck as one aesthetic unit. Combining her Signature Facelift (also called a Rhytidectomy) with her finesse Neck Lift, she lifts the neck – correcting neck banding, lines, and wrinkles – together with the lower face, tailoring each face-and-neck lift to the patient to revitalize the midface, jawline, and neck. Together, this comprehensive approach corrects sagging, looseness, and excess fat in the neck, under the chin, and along the jawline to rejuvenate the facial muscles and smoothly contour the lower face, jawline, and neck – providing the gold standard for restoring a youthful, natural, refreshed look that is elegant and long-lasting.

Sagging, loose skin and natural loss of facial fat in the mid-and-lower face develop over time. During every surgical facelift, Dr. Hamilton first artistically restores lost volume to the face with her Facial Fat Transfer (also called Facial Fat Grafting) — a transformational procedure where she performs liposuction to extract and harvest excess fat from another body site (typically the inner thighs or abdomen) and deposits it strategically to re-volumize, smooth, and revitalize the face. She then surgically lifts and tightens sagging facial tissues, removing redundant skin. She reframes the skin, re-positioning the underlying facial muscles to increase volume in the cheek region. She corrects jowls in the cheeks and jaw and erases any neck wattles (loose skin and excess fat that can form a “double chin” or “turkey neck”) – to elegantly redefine the cheekbones, jawline, and neck. Lines, wrinkles, and deep folds in the lower face are beautifully smoothed, revealing tighter, firmer skin. The total effect is a significantly rejuvenated appearance with defined, sculpted cheeks and jawline and a smooth, polished neck — featuring youthful contours that are anatomically correct and preserve the individual’s natural identity.

Aesthetic judgment is the ultimate key to performing a finesse face-and-neck lift that exemplifies modern beauty. With Dr. Hamilton’s fine aesthetic eye, classical training as an artist, and advanced, innovative surgical and technical skills, she tailors her state-of-the-art lift to the individual’s unique facial anatomy and desired outcomes – delivering precise shape, contour, balance, and symmetry, while respecting the person’s ethnic facial elements. Her facelift artistry celebrates the individual features and the unique expressions of beauty for the ultimate facial optimization that reflects the inner vitality and beauty of her patients.

When is the appropriate time to do facelift surgery? This decision depends on the individual’s aesthetic goals and the extent of signs of aging requiring reversal. A growing trend is to do a smaller, more discreet face-and-neck lift (and eyelift) at a younger age (the late 30s or early 40s) to look refined and refreshed earlier in life. Younger facelift patients experience a more youthful aging process, a faster rate of healing (due to less tissue manipulation required and more robust skin quality), and subtle, very natural-looking results where a youthful look can be successfully maintained over time. Whether younger or older, Dr. Hamilton’s finesse facelift creates the fullness and curves of youth – highlighting beautiful, sculpted definition and refinement, while preserving the natural character of the face, jawline, and neck.  

Dr. Hamilton often combines a surgical facelift with complementary facial aesthetic procedures — surgical and nonsurgical — to achieve global facial harmony and create a comprehensive facial transformation, such as a surgical brow lift, upper and lower eye lift (blepharoplasty), earlobe reduction, buccal fat pad reduction, CO2 laser skin resurfacing, surgical lip lift, chin implant, lip augmentation (with dermal filler), even a rhinoplasty (nose reshaping). 

With her additional specialty in microsurgery, Dr. Hamilton is widely known for her ultra-fine suturing skills, meticulously concealing the tiny, super-thin, delicate incision lines, which become inconspicuous. Patients are restaurant-ready 2 weeks post-procedure on average (with minimal swelling or bruising, easily covered by makeup). The final outcome restores the lines and shape of a youthful face and neck for a beautiful, natural, exquisite look. 

What Are the Benefits of Facelift Surgery?

The blend of Dr. Hamilton’s fine eye-hand coordination, artistry, and meticulousness creates an elegant, natural revitalization of the face and neck. Her patients look youthfully refreshed with smooth contours, symmetry and harmony, while still beautifully preserving their natural identity.
Dr. Hamilton tailors every face-and-neck lift procedure to the unique facial anatomy and aesthetic goals of each patient, blending artistry with her advanced understanding of facial aesthetics and her innovative, leading-edge techniques (such as minimally-invasive methodologies, artfully-executed facial fat transfer, precise incision placement, and ultra-fine sutures that are strategically concealed, becoming imperceptible over time). This customized approach restores beauty to the face and neck, producing the following benefits:

• A youthful, refreshed, natural-looking appearance that addresses sagging skin, deep wrinkles, and jowls — featuring lifted, tightened facial tissues and reframed skin that redefine the cheekbones, jawline and neck. Facelift surgery corrects sagging tissues by restoring lost volume, tightening the underlying fascial structures and removing excess skin. This type of surgery also corrects lines, wrinkles, and folds – including the nasolabial folds (or “smile lines”) and the mentolabial folds (or “marionette lines”) – especially in the mid-face region.
• Smooth, youthful-looking, well-defined facial contours.
• Re-volumized, smooth, soft-looking skin — customized by Dr. Hamilton for each of her patients with her Signature Facial Fat Transfer/Grafting. Fat transfer first involves using liposuction to harvest fat from another body site, usually the abdomen or thighs. The fat is then carefully prepared for re-injection into the face in small quantities to increase facial volume. In the mid-face, the volume of the cheeks is increased – cheekbone augmentation being of vital importance to facial beauty as the cheekbones provide a major horizontal support buttress to the face. Providing structural support to the face via cheek re-volumization subtly improves and corrects – through a secondary lifting effect – the nasolabial folds. Fat may also be directly injected to plump up the facial wrinkles (such as the nasolabial folds and marionette lines) and the earlobes for a youthful look. Dr. Hamilton also injects fat around the eyes in the periorbital region to revitalize the eyes and decrease the prominence of hollowing of the under-eye tear troughs – this treatment creates a beautiful, smooth lid-cheek junction, providing further contouring around the cheekbones for added definition.
  • With Facial Fat Grafting, Dr. Hamilton targets and revitalizes the following facial features:
    • forehead.
    • temples.
    • cheekbones.
    • peri-orbital area around each eye, including the under-eye tear-trough (the hollow groove located between the lower eye lid and the cheek) and the upper-eyelid sulcus (the hollow, recessed area of the upper eyelid underneath the bony orbital rim).
    • nasolabial folds (or “smile lines”), the crease extending from both sides of the nose to the corners of the mouth.
    • mentolabial folds (“marionette lines” or “puppet lines”) extending from each corner of the mouth down towards the chin.
    • earlobes
    • jawline, including the chin and pre-jowl sulcus (the latter being a shallow divot between the chin and the jowl).

Dr. Hamilton’s surgical lift of the face and neck reshapes their foundation and creates a radiant, long-lasting, natural-looking rejuvenation – with no pulled look or overly tight appearance – that enhances self-confidence. She often combines a face-and-neck lift with other transformational Facial Optimization Procedures such as: CO2 Laser Skin Resurfacing, an Upper and Lower Eyelift (eyelid surgery called an Upper and Lower Blepharoplasty), a Surgical Brow Lift, a Surgical Lip Lift, or a Chin Implant, Dermal Fillers (with Lip Augmentation being an especially popular option) – to achieve even more comprehensive facial revitalization. Hand Rejuvenation is often added to a facelift procedure via one or more procedures, including CO2 Laser Skin Resurfacing to boost skin quality – plus either Dermal Fillers, Bio-stimulators, or Fat Transfer to the Hands (the latter using the patient’s own autologous fat) to replace lost volume. Rejuvenating the hands restores their youthful beauty – and ensures that the hands of facelift patients look as young as their newly enhanced face and neck.

Primary Facelift

Dr. Hamilton performs modern, state-of-the-art facelift surgery. Her Signature Primary Facelift reflects her passion and commitment to create a youthful, vibrant facial rejuvenation for each patient.  With artistry and precision, Dr. Hamilton lifts and tightens the facial tissues and underlying facial musculature to restructure the foundation of the lower face and neck, corrects sagging, removes or redistributes excess fat deposits as required, and eliminates excess loose skin, tightening the skin that lies passively above the reworked muscle layers. Using this approach, she creates an elegant, refined, comprehensive facial rejuvenation – highlighting a youthful lift and defined contours – that is exquisite, natural-looking, and long-lasting. Dr. Hamilton includes Neck Lift Surgery with facelift surgery, tightening the platysma muscle to correct lines, wrinkles, and banding in the neck, removing excess skin, and creating smooth, defined, youthful neck and jawline contours – a comprehensive approach that dynamically revitalizes and optimizes the face-neck unit. 

During the consultation, Dr. Hamilton assesses her patients’ medical history and aesthetic goals, analyzes their unique facial structure and skin quality, and presents a bespoke, customized surgical plan to achieve the patients’ aesthetic vision. She will discuss different techniques she performs to address the different components of the face and neck to create a youthful, natural, harmonious appearance. Dr. Hamilton employs Facial Fat Transfer/Grafting to the face using her patient’s own autologous fat which is extracted via Liposuction. She then uses this fat to fill the deflated fat compartments of the face – a technique known as Fat Compartment Filling. Areas that are frequently augmented with fat include the temples (volume loss here creates a “peanut-shaped” facial appearance, a sign of aging) and the central region of the face. The aging face loses volume over time secondary to facial bone atrophy, muscle atrophy, and loss of volume of facial fat pads. Dr. Hamilton then performs an advanced lift: She meticulously makes inconspicuous, hidden incisions, starting at the temple and then around the ear following the natural crease by each earlobe, concealing them behind the ear and in the hairline. She lifts the skin, tightens and secures the underlying muscles and connective tissues, and removes the excess skin.  

Specifically, Dr. Hamilton addresses the SMAS or “Superficial Muscular Aponeurotic System” – the deep strength layer of the face that continues into the neck as the platysma muscle – re-draping the facial tissues overlying it. (The “deep plane” of the face and neck refers to the space beneath the SMAS and platysma muscle. The SMAS is a layer of tissue connecting the muscles of the face and neck to the skin and plays a key role in facial expression.) Dr. Hamilton repositions the underlying, descended facial tissues, manipulating them under the skin to improve the position of the malar fat pad to its youthful, anatomical position – which also has the effect of restoring volume to the central face and cheek area. She tightens the muscles, corrects jowls, tightens and lifts the face, and removes excess loose skin to produce flattering, youthful contours. She smooths the fine lines and wrinkles that appear on the face and corrects the underlying facial hollows and depressions that enable the skin to fold (especially in the midface and the nasolabial folds). The total cumulative result is a revitalized face and neck that reveals smooth, tighter, firmer skin, sculpted cheekbones, a defined jawline and neck, and balanced facial profiling that restores the firm, refined, and contoured appearance of youth.   

Facelift Philosophy

Dr. Hamilton’s philosophy is to create elegant, ultra-precise aesthetic refinements that exquisitely showcase the unique beauty of each of her patients. As a classically-trained artist and board-certified plastic surgeon, she has a fine eye for facial aesthetics and sophisticated facelift surgery – blending her experience, artistry, and finesse surgical skills to create a stunning facial rejuvenation. Dr. Hamilton is a highly-trained, world-class plastic surgeon – with a deep understanding of the anatomy and the complex intricacies of a surgical face-and-neck lift – who attracts patients from throughout the U.S. and around the world. With Dr. Hamilton’s customized surgical plan, aesthetic eye, and skilled hands, she performs the gold standard in modern face-and-neck lift surgery. Her patients look and feel like the best version of themselves, while preserving their natural identity – without obvious signs of surgery – delighting in their new, radiant, smooth appearance that epitomizes natural youthfulness.