Platysmaplasty Neck Tightening
Video transcript: A platysmaplasty is something I always perform with a long incision facelift and it's much like double chin surgery that I perform. It's very helpful in patients with a lax neck to define the mento-cervical angle very specifically through an incision in the front. Once that's defined then the whole neck can be pulled posteriorly through the long incision.
So why do we do a platysmaplasty? It's based on this mento-cervical angle, if it's too obtuse then I often will recommend the platysmaplasty at the time of a short scar lift or almost always at the time with a long scar lift.
Sometimes there's localized fat in the area, so if someone has a pocket of fat in the midline, I think it's very helpful to do a platysmaplasty and excise that fat directly.
And this is an example we can see what the ideal angle is probably one hundred and five to one hundred and twenty degrees. Once it gets to be higher than that, this is probably one hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty degrees, it's probably a little bit too obtuse, so we like to tighten that when we can. And you can imagine why having an incision in the posterior hairline here that allows us to substantially pull in that upper direction.
This is how the platysmaplasty is performed. The skin is elevated through a small submental incision, we perform a platysmamyotomy or we cut the platysma horizontally at the point we want the mento-cervical angle to be. Once that is done, the platysma is sutured in the midline quite tightly with permanent stitches, then the skin is closed.
The results of platysmaplasty are based on how tight we can get the mento-cervical angle so this is an example of someone with an obtuse angle and this might be what they look like after a platysmaplasty so we really want to try and achieve that sharper neck angle when we can.