Facelifts aren’t just to combat aging. Young people are using it to finesse facial features

Traditionally used to reduce signs of ageing, the facelift is often associated with those in later life. However, an increasing number of younger people have been seeking out the surgery.

Kim Haberly’s dark blonde hair hangs behind her shoulders away from her face. Her almond-shaped eyes are faintly ringed by the yellow tone of an almost-healed bruise. There are two thumb-sized divots next to her hairline (barely perceptible until she points it out) from her recent temple lift, a cosmetic surgery that lifts the outer brow. Ironically, her swollen face looks plump and round despite her partial buccal fat removal — a procedure that extracts the soft pads of tissue found inside the cheeks to create a slimmer face. Still, she could pop to the store without raising so much as an eyebrow from on-lookers. It’s not until Haberly turns her face to the right and raises the camera close to her ear, displaying two freshly sutured incisions, that you might suspect she is fresh out of a facelift. “I’ve woken up really swollen today because I slept on my side,” Haberly told CNN over a video call from her hotel in Turkey. Last month, Haberly traveled over 7,700 miles from her home in Perth, Australia to receive one of the most invasive facial surgeries available: a deep plane facelift. The advanced lifting technique — which has become a favorite of specialist surgeons for its apparent longer lasting results — not only repositions the top layer of skin (known as an endoscopic facelift) but also the complex network of tissue and fibrous muscles below. At 37, Haberly, who also had a neck lift operation, is almost a decade more junior than the youngest average facelift candidate in Australia, and in the eyes of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), is at least a whopping 18 years ahead of schedule. Traditionally used to reduce signs of aging, the facelift is often associated with those in later life. In the US, almost 60% of facelift patients in 2023 were aged between 55 and 69, according to ASPS. Similarly Generation X, which encompasses those aged from 45 to 60, were the primary age group seeking out facelifts in Australia that same year, research from the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery and Medicine shows. And although there is no published data on the average age of a facelift patient in the UK, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) recently reported the procedure is “more common among those 50 and above.” Yet, in the last few years, an increasing number of younger people have been seeking out the surgery — not as an anti-aging method but to finesse their features, having grown up in an extremely digital world where their physical appearances are constantly on show. According to the ASPS, the number of facelift patients in 2023 aged between 20-29 and 30-39 each jumped by 7% compared to the previous year, while those from the 40-54 age group grew by just 3%.