Dr. Andrew Jacono and the Science Behind Lasting Facelift Results

When a facelift fails to look natural, the problem usually isn’t the surgeon’s hands it’s the underlying approach. Skin-tightening facelifts create tension along the surface, which distorts facial features and fades quickly as elastic tissue stretches back out. Dr. Andrew Jacono spent years studying why conventional results disappointed patients and concluded that the solution required going deeper, literally.

Releasing the Ligaments That Hold the Face Down

The extended deep-plane facelift that Dr. Andrew Jacono pioneered targets the facial retaining ligaments fibrous anchors that hold skin and tissue to underlying bone. As the face ages, these ligaments don’t loosen; instead, the soft tissue they support descends around them, creating jowls, nasolabial folds, and a flattened midface. Conventional facelifts pull skin upward without addressing those anchors, which limits how much the face can actually be repositioned and how long those results last.

Dr. Jacono’s method releases the ligaments directly, freeing the composite tissue block to be repositioned vertically rather than simply tightened horizontally. The distinction matters clinically. Vertical repositioning restores the face’s youthful geometry instead of compressing it. Tissues return to where they were, rather than being forced laterally toward the ears. The result is a face that looks lifted from within rather than stretched from outside.

Clinical Data Confirm the Advantage

Dr. Jacono’s 2011 study in Aesthetic Surgery Journal, based on 153 patients, recorded complication rates well below the field’s benchmarks. Later research confirmed that deep-plane techniques carry a lower risk of facial nerve injury compared to more superficial methods, because the dissection preserves anatomical relationships and blood supply more effectively. Results from the extended deep-plane approach last 12 to 15 years by documented measures—a timeframe that reflects the technique’s structural foundation. Dr. Jacono performs approximately 250 of these procedures each year and has documented findings from more than 2,000 cases in the 2021 textbook The Art and Science of Extended Deep Plane Facelifting, a technical resource now used by surgeons worldwide. Go to this page for additional information.

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