August 1, 2024

Typical Age Related Changes of the Face

Tags
No items found.
share

Typical Age Related Changes of the Face

These are the typical age related changes that we see in most people's faces. Of course this occurs at different ages depending on the person.

Some of the first things we see are naso labial folds and they run from the nose to the corner of the mouth as well as marionette lines which run from the corner of the mouth down to the jaw line.

Wrinkles and smile lines occur, particularly around the eyes and skin laxity occurs in the upper and lower eyelids, as well along the jaw line and the neck, and that's what causes the formation of the jowl.

On profile view what we start to see is jowl formation along the jaw line. The skin becomes laxity and we don't see the jaw line as clearly. The angle between the neck and chin becomes more obtuse.

And again that's more obtuse mento-cervical angle. Fat deposits can occur under the chin and the skin in general becomes more lax as we get older and that again can cause jowl formation and also laxity of the mento-cervical angle. In terms of some of the genetic features that contribute to facial aging, one of them is really a recessive chin and as we've mentioned in other videos a recessive chin really shortens the horizontal portion of the neck and makes the neck look a little more lax.

In this example the difference between an ideally projected chin and a less projected chin sort of illustrates how that changes the contour of the neck behind that so we want that mento-cervical angle to be tight. One of the ways of doing that is to advance the chin in addition to tightening the neck tissues. Another genetic feature that predisposes to a obtuse looking neck is  a low riding hiway bone. The hiway bone is part of the laryngeal complex and if it sits too low, then there is a poor definition to the angle of the neck. Someone who has a very high hiway bone, their neck looks quite tight. There's not much you can really do about the hiway bone other than just be aware that if it sits really low then even changes surgically to correct the mento-cervical angle are often limited.