I am writing to describe female beauty between the ages of 35-55.
It reflects the "ideal" I aim to achieve in my practice. If we are to work together, our values and expectations need to be aligned.
Every age has its beauty, it's true.
But the beauty of each age is different.
When you take some of the factors that determine the beauty of an 18-year-old young woman and place them on the face of a 50-year-old woman, you get not a beautiful woman, but a strange woman's face.
In this article, I will talk specifically about the beauty criteria for "women", because the criteria for men in the same age group are completely different.
When you examine the most beautiful women in the 35-55 age range, you can see that they have some common features.
Almost all of them have thin, angular and expressive faces.
The total volume of the face decreases with age, the face becomes thinner and this thinning gives a unique beauty to middle-aged women. Global fullness of the face is a beauty criterion specific to 10-25 years of age. It does not suit a middle-aged beauty. For this reason, we do not have a goal to plump the face completely in middle-aged women. One of the biggest injustices that can be done to middle-age women is to mask the beauty of this age with applications such as excessive filling, fat injection.
Critical volume losses can be intervened while maintaining the fine facial features of the middle-age beauty. For example, volume losses due to continuous compression of the mimic muscles under the eyes and the chewing muscle in the temple can be balanced with fat injections. However, even in critical compression areas, the aim is not to give the face an extra fullness, but to balance the volume loss in the aging process.
The most suitable surgical intervention for the thin facial structure of the middle-age beauty is deep plan facelift. This procedure removes the squaring that occurs in the lower part of the face during the aging process, the crowding around the mouth and the deterioration in the neck line. The result is automatically a thinner and angled facial structure. Although the procedure alone does not reduce the face, it "reveals" a thinner and angled facial structure by moving the crowded soft tissue mass to a more ideal anatomical position.
We said that the face of a middle-aged beauty should be thin, but at this point, it is worth mentioning the potential harms of some interventions aimed at thinning the face. In middle-aged women, the face is already thinning spontaneously. We try to keep the soft tissue balance of a spontaneously thinning face in place. We never try to shrink and thin the face ourselves.
This is extremely important.
Because in the middle age group, anything that reduces volume from our face with external intervention creates a relative relaxation in the skin and SMAS layer and makes the face sag fast. For this reason, it is beneficial to avoid volume-reducing applications such as masseter botox, liposuction, ultrasonic fat ablation, radiofrequency fat ablation, fat-melting mesotherapy and bichectomy in the middle age group.
In my practice, such applications can only be applied simultaneously with facelift. If you can balance the relaxation that occurs as a result of volume deficiency with facelift in the same session, volume reduction procedures can be performed. Other than that, you need to be very, very careful. Because while trying to reach the ideal of the thin face of the middle-aged beauty, it is possible to age the individual rapidly and force a facelift surgery.
As I mentioned above, the fine structure of the face in a middle-aged beauty is meaningful as long as it is simultaneous with angularity. The main thing that provides angularity is a balanced muscle / skeletal / tooth structure. For this reason, it is not appropriate to minimise skeletal or muscular structures in order to obtain a thin face in middle-aged women. It is of great importance to preserve the deep structures that determine the angularity such as the masseter muscle, temporal muscle, jawbone, cheekbone, under-brow bone. Especially the temporal muscle in the temporal region can shrink significantly when the botox application protrudes a little and a serious collapse can occur in this area. Masseter botox can narrow the jaw angle over the age of 40 and disrupt the transition contour between the cheek and neck. Chin filing and cheekbone reduction surgeries are interventions that you should definitely avoid if you do not want to age 10 years in a few months.
I prefer applications that "emphasise" the skeletal structure in order to maintain or improve the angular character of the face in middle-aged beautiful women. For this purpose, I use calcium hydroxy apatite (CaHA) fillers such as radiesse, novuma, just above the bone in areas such as chin tip, cheekbone, jaw angle, temple, nasolabial groove. Both the duration of effect and the price benefit ratio are higher. However, if there is a serious deficiency in these areas, it is useful to prioritise surgical options. For example, if the jaw tip bone is behind, it will be much more beneficial to perform a jaw tip advancement (genioplasty) in the early period rather than filling 2-3 ml here every year. For example, if the cheekbone is severely underdeveloped, it will be more beneficial to put a prosthesis here or to perform a mid-face lift.
In principle, areas with skeletal deficiencies age faster. For this reason, it is particularly useful to diagnose skeletal deficiencies in the early 30s and to optimise skeletal defects in order for the patient to age well.
The sine qua non of the faces of middle-age beautiful women is an expressive, meaningful facial structure. Perhaps the most important thing that adds expression to the face in this age group is mimic wrinkles and folds. Here, I cannot help but criticise the botox fury. Botox should never and never eliminate mimic wrinkles and mimics. The purpose of botox application should be to draw overactive mimics to normal activity. When you laugh, there is no middle-age beauty without double folds at the corners of the mouth and crow's feet at the corners of the eyes. When I write like this, people get the impression that I am against botox. I am not against it, I am just trying to say that it is a "medicine" that should be used in the right indication.
In the past, phenol / croton oil peels that can almost completely erase mimic wrinkles were widely used. When you erase the wrinkles of a middle-aged woman, the smooth skin of 20 years old does not appear. The result is a flat and shiny surface like paper, incompatible with the overall face. This extremely flat surface grins because it is incompatible with the surface features of the surrounding structures, and although those looking from the environment cannot understand exactly what is happening, they can intuit that something is not normal. Such results are unacceptable for me. For this reason, I prefer more moderate methods such as TCA in surface treatments, which reduce the depth of wrinkles but do not completely eliminate them.
In all age groups, from a newborn baby to an 80-year-old woman, full eye opening is a very important beauty criterion. A full eye opening means that the upper eyelid eyelash border passes tangentially from the upper border of the coloured halo of the eye. In the aging process, this level decreases by 1 millimetre every 10 years after the age of 30 and the eyes look smaller and flatter. This appearance reduces the energy in the gaze. It creates a perception as if the light of the eye has gone out. It contradicts the ideal of the "expressive" face of the middle-aged beauty. We call this condition "ptosis" or droopy eyelid. Eyelid ptosis is a condition independent of excess skin on the eyelid or eyebrow level. You can find a separate article on this subject on the blog. Normal eye aperture is very important for my mid-life beauty ideal of an expressive facial structure.
Another important factor is tooth structure. Although this is not a subject that I am directly interested in, a beautiful smile is one of the most important determinants of beauty for all ages without exception. There is no other factor as effective as the smile in an individual's "expression". In the vast majority of patients with malocclusion, smile dynamics are disturbed. Patients develop strange smile dynamics to hide their tooth structure. This is a major blow to the "expressive" facial structure of the middle-aged beauty. I have patients who want procedures such as lip filling and lip lift without optimising their smile dynamics yet. The priority in aesthetics around the mouth should always be dental treatment
Finally, I would like to briefly mention lip and mid-face fullness. In early youth, full lips and cheeks filling the under-eye area are acceptable. In middle age beauties, lip and mid-face fullness should be adjusted at a very optimum level. We definitely consider very thin lips or collapsed mid-face area in the treatment plan. If there is a severe volume loss under the eyes, we apply mid-face lift, and if the lip volume is severely reduced, we apply lip augmentation. However, the majority of these patients are already individuals with thin lips or a volumeless under-eye structure even in their first youth. Our main goal is to bring the lip and mid-face fullness to the "normal" level. For this reason, my preference in midface aesthetics is midface lift (midfacelift) surgery based on the principle of redistributing the volume of the cheek on the facial skeleton without adding an external volume. A fullness above normal in the lip or mid-face creates a "vamp" appearance that coarsens the face of middle-aged women, distracts attention away from the eyes, disrupts the natural curves of the face. I don't like it, I don't do it.
Before starting facial beautification, I recommend that you seek the opinion of a professional about what is beautiful and what we should aim for.
Don't be an Instagram beauty, be the beauty of your age.
You need to look good not only from one angle, not only in one photograph, but from every angle, while talking and laughing.
Stay with love,
Stay Beautiful.
OB