While heavy jowls and voluminous necks may have worked for Marlon Brando and Winston Churchill, giving them an air of dignified wisdom, for the rest of us, sagging around the chin and neck simply robs us of our youthful vitality.
As Americans join the world in dropping a cool $250 billion annually on anti-aging skin treatments and products (and this number is rising), tackling aging around the neck and jowl is a particularly frustrating battle. And there’s very little a miracle cream can do to help.
At The Yeung Institute, we understand your frustration. The effort you put into maintaining firm, wrinkle-free skin on your face can be completely undermined by telltale sagging around your jaw and neck.
This is why we offer some beautiful solutions to our Houston-area clients. To learn why the neck and jawline give away your age and, more importantly, what you can about it, read on.
Going south
Aging creates a number of unwanted effects on your appearance that slowly erode the skin of your youth. To start, your production of collagen, which provides the foundational support in your skin, begins to wind down as the clock moves ever forward.
If you couple this with the enormous abuse your skin has been under throughout your life, protecting and shielding you from the world around you, you’re left with collagen levels that can’t keep up with the repairs. Over the years, the wear and tear become more pronounced as your skin struggles to keep up.
What many people don’t know is that your once-toned skin also performs another important task: keeping the thin layer of fat under your skin firmly in place. As your skin begins to lose its elasticity, this fat succumbs to gravity and falls downward.
On your face, this leads to sagging skin around your jawline as the fat drops from your cheeks and gathers at the lowest place, creating the jowly look of age. Around your neck, this effect can be even more dramatic for several reasons.
First, as your skin loosens, it begins to droop, especially under your chin and around your neck. When this happens, the thick band of muscle that runs down your neck, called the platysma, can also start to sag, eliminating the clearly defined right angle that separated your head from your neck, leaving a sloping angle that blurs the lines. The final insult is the gathering of falling fat into your submental space.
The net effect of these processes is a jawline and neck that wiggles and sags, which is why it’s none-too-lovingly referred to as turkey neck. And no matter how great your skin looks everywhere else, jowls, turkey necks, and double chins can neutralize and reverse all of your anti-aging efforts.
Fighting fowl
If you find yourself in this struggle, we can do a couple of things to tackle jowls and sagging necks that have a dramatic effect on your overall appearance.
To start, we offer a mini face-lift, where we go in through small incisions around your ears (which helps conceal the scars) and pull the skin around your jawline back up. In some cases, we also move the muscles so your skin stays put for years to come.
We can also lift the skin around your neck in what’s called a submentoplasty. During this neck-lift procedure, we fix the laxity in your neck muscles, lift and tighten your skin, remove any excess tissue, and remove any fat that may have migrated into the area.
If you opt for both procedures, we can do them at the same time, providing incredible results as we restore your smooth jawline and re-accentuate the area under your chin and around your neck.
If you’d like to get rid of the signs of aging around your neck and jawline, please g
