One of the challenges with surgery for face lifts is measuring outcomes. Every surgeon has good results and every surgeons has results that could be improved on.
I think it’ is really important to give confidence to people that you as a surgeon are measuring your results and are open about those outcomes.
Usually in the commercial world of appearance medicine surgery, this is often done through Google reviews, Instagram posts, and other forms of social media where either patients or surgeons talk about their techniques. Generally these tend to be positive reviews.
The Face-Q analysis of facial outcomes gives a really good way to look at individual patient results and to look at results across all patients. It gives a way to measure the results against other published results around the world. For that reason, I started using the Face-Q a couple of years ago. I’ve presented this at our local plastic surgical meeting in Queenstown in 2025. I think that helps me to understand what patients want and what their outcomes are like.
To understand more about the Face-Q, I give the questionnaire to patients in the waiting room, both before their face lift surgery and then at around 6 to 12 months after their surgery. Before the surgery I ask them how old they feel they look as well as an appraisal of how natural a result they are looking for after surgery.
The post-op one is a little different. I’m interested to know what they view the satisfaction with lower face and jawline, cheeks, and the overall outcome of the facelift.
Over the last 50 or so patients, most people feel the age they are, meaning their assessment of how old or young they look, tends to correlate with about the current biological age. After the surgery, they tend to feel about seven years younger. Looking at international studies, this is the same finding.
So people feel they look 7 years younger than where they started – which is the same for overseas studies. It is my experience that people come back for a revision facelift around 10 to 15 years after the first surgery when they have noticed that gravity starts working again, and they might need a refresh.
I was also interested to look at my outcomes at six to 12 months. And many people very kindly gave me 100% their satisfaction with their outcomes. For a period of time I was using my own satisfaction study I asked if they felt the result looked natural, whether they would go through the procedure again if needed and whether they would suggest it to others.
It was interesting that I found that 90% of the time, people would think this is a good surgery to recommend to others that they would go through the same procedure again, if it was needed, and that , the operation had met their expectations.
When we break it down to individual areas of the face, many people gave 100% as the operation delivering the result they were looking for. The averaged score was around 18 marks out of 20 for the outcome.
So in terms of working out what this all means, I often get people asking me to either put testimonials on my website or ask to have more Google reviews. The issue with testimonials is that the Medical Council of New Zealand explicitly says no testimonials should be placed onto medical websites.
As far as Google reviews go, I know that it’s really helpful, to use those results when say picking restaurants and so on, but I don’t think it’s very helpful when picking surgeons. When I look at some of my colleagues’ websites who have a number of Google rankings, I wonder whether that’s because they’ve explicitly asked those people to put those reviews on-line. I don’t ask people to do that as I feel that it’s a very personal journey having cosmetic surgery. To put your name into a Google review as having had a facelift is probably giving a little bit too much information away. Mostly people wish to be quite private about that.