A “vampire face lift” injection treatment may help shave years off your apparent age, according to businessweek.com.
Patients who choose to undergo vampire face lifts may do so to combat signs of aging on the face. Even with proper skin care, time and gravity take hold and wrinkles can begin to appear in places like the nasolabial folds, or laugh lines.
While patients currently may choose injectable fillers to diminish the appearance of wrinkles and lines, some plastic surgeons are looking at vampire face lifts as a means to reverse some aging factors.
The way vampire face lifts work is not actually like a facelift surgery, but a procedure that uses components of the patient’s own blood. Platelets and fibrin in the blood has been shown to increase collagen production and strengthen connective tissues to repair some injuries.
Once the surgeon takes a sample of blood and has separated the platelets and fibrin, they are mixed with calcium chloride and prepared then injected into aged areas of the face.
Weeks after the procedure, it was found that at the treatment site, new collagen and blood vessels had developed. Researchers found that at ten weeks after patients underwent the vampire facelifts, the effects evened out, but should be long-lasting.
As vampire face lifts still must seek FDA approval, some plastic surgeons are skeptical of the benefits of the treatment.
Plastic surgeon and former AAPS president Phil Haeck told Los Angeles Daily News that more research should be done on the procedure. As Haeck says, plastic surgeons ensure that little to no blood is left behind in a traditional facelift, so he is unsure how placing blood under the skin achieves the desired result.
Haeck adds that his opinion on vampire facelifts could be changed, but that he needs to see further evidence of the procedure’s effects and safety.
To find out more about non-surgical treatments for aging on the face, we encourage you to email Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Aboolian.
