Dr. Cameron Chesnut On The Biggest Things Aging Your Face, Modern Facelifts, & How To Look Younger Without Looking Fake

**Michael Bosstick** (0:01)
Welcome to The Bossticks.
Starring Lauryn Bosstick and Michael Bosstick. Together, they are The Bossticks.

**Lauryn Bosstick** (0:14)
Okay, so I'm so excited about this episode. I have eight million questions.

**Cameron Chesnut** (0:19)
I love it, let's go.

**Lauryn Bosstick** (0:19)
I think let's just throw you right in. What makes a bad facelift?

**Cameron Chesnut** (0:24)
Ooh, well, facelifts have been through an evolution. In a nutshell, if I could answer it in one, it's the facelift that you can tell happened, basically. You see it, you know it. And we all know what that looks like. There's no subtleties around that. It's people call it windblown. There's some very telltale signs that are kind of fun.
Because once I explain them, you'll see them everywhere. One of them is where your earlobe is pulled down, which is called a pixie ear deformity. Or if you can see inside of somebody's ear, like the front anatomy of their ear is pulled forward. And it looks, we call that like a gunsight deformity. You can look down inside of their ear. There's all kinds of these little telltale signs. The most obvious one walking around is what we call sweep. And that is where there's like a Nike swoosh, going from the corner of your mouth to your ear, like this tight sweeping motion that happens when the lower face is pulled too tight and the upper face continues to sink down on it. These are all very much, they're still walking around now, but they're somewhat dependent on technique. And some of the older school techniques are notorious for those.
Because face lifting started with just cutting and pulling skin, and then it went to some slightly more, slightly deeper but still superficial layers. And now we're just in a whole different avenue of, in a pretty rapid evolution, even over the past, call it five or six years, in how facelifts are being performed.

**Michael Bosstick** (1:38)
So would those facelifts of the past not happen any longer?

**Cameron Chesnut** (1:43)
They still happen now. It's in transition, I would say, based off of training, belief, and you know, I can't take it away from somebody as an older school technique. If they've done it tens of thousands of times and have good, successful, happy patients, then so be it. Like, that's a successful measure. That's a good question. What makes a successful facelift? If it's when the patient's happy, or is it when it's the best facelift it could have ever been? Those are different answers for different people, right? Like, what are you seeking? Are you seeking the best? Are you seeking something that's gonna make you happy?
So they still exist in evolution, but some of those telltale signs certainly still happen.

**Michael Bosstick** (2:15)
Is this a technology thing that has changed, or is it just a pure technique?

**Cameron Chesnut** (2:20)
Yeah, great question. There's no tech difference here. This is all technique driven, which is really actually, that's an insightful question, because I hadn't thought about it quite that way, but this is all technique driven. People may be progressing different aspects of the procedures, everybody kind of adding their own things.
And the way that teaching works now is more rapid. And this, I mean, we could apply this to anything. The way that seeing before and after photos works now is much more rapid. And so word spreads fast, techniques spread faster, they're more easily adopted, they're easier to communicate. You can see it on video, you can see results. So it's all technique driven, just really cool.

**Lauryn Bosstick** (2:53)
I'm noticing that some of the best facelifts are on younger patients.

**Cameron Chesnut** (2:58)
Yes, for sure.

**Lauryn Bosstick** (2:59)
And there's this look that is almost effortless, that I can't really put my finger on, that I see around the 30 to 45 year old Mark. Are you seeing a lot of people want to facelift earlier and do you think it's strategic?

**Cameron Chesnut** (3:15)
Yes, so you said one thing in there that's really important is that you recognize that it's better, but you can't put your finger on it. This is like my goal with every procedure that I do, which is heavily leveraged around how our brain interprets faces. You never even go into your analytical frontal cortex. It's all in the core of our brain, in your emotional centers, in your reward centers, attractiveness, trustworthiness, all these core elements.
That's the goal, is to stay in those regions and have it be better, but you don't even know why. And eyes and mouths are really important to that. And so a lot of times when people are talking about facelifts, there's actually an element of what happened to the eyes and the mouth that go into that, because as you can imagine, as humans, we're uniquely programmed to pay attention to eyes and mouths more because they're communicating emotion and quite literally our nonverbal communication, right? So people seek lifts younger now, partially because techniques have improved and you can do them better at younger ages, partially for all of the other aspects of just understanding that you can do them younger, seeing more of them via social media or media, whatever it may be. And then also just the shift in what the goal of the facelift is now. Facelift isn't for like old faces necessarily. My goal with any procedure is to, the thing that I want to hear my patient say is that, you know, I feel great, I'm pulling all the levers that I can pull with my health and my wellness. And, you know, I'm very realistically, reasonably exercising and eating well. And now when I look in the mirror, it just doesn't quite look like how I feel. Like something along those lines, that's like a really good sign for me that we're going to have a really successful procedure because I'm trying to rejuvenate, right? And even in your 40s, there's changes that can be rejuvenated.