Face-lifts may take away years from a person's appearance, but a new research suggests they appear to do little to boost self-esteem. In the study, the researchers observe what 50 patients, mostly women, said about their sense of self-esteem, both immediately before having a plastic surgery and six months later.
Dr. Andrew Jacono, lead author of the study and a board certified plastic surgeon with the New York Center for Facial Plastic and Laser Surgery in New York City said that the result of the investigation are not surprising, because as he sees it, self-esteem is much more complicated than someone's appearance. It's implanted in a long developmental process that starts during their earlier years. So, to think that what has taken a lifetime of work to develop could be changed by one simple operation is just ridiculous.
Jacono and his colleagues reported the findings of their study in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. The researchers concentrated on 59 patients who had a face-lift at a single center between July and October of 2013. None of the patients suffered from any serious facial disfigurement. But their goal was to have a more youthful appearance.
Self-esteem tests that were distributed by the researchers before the surgery's aim was to look at various measures of the patient's sense of self-worth. This included feelings of competence and/or failure. Out of the highest score of 30, the average grade was just over 24, some patients scored as low as 14 and others hit a high of 30.
The researchers were able to reevaluate 50 of the patients six months after their surgery. All but two were women, with an average age of 58. Patients said their face-lift had given them an average of almost nine years off their appearance back. Those with lower self-esteem scores before surgery did, in fact, see a rise in their post-surgery scores. Those with high pre-surgery self-esteem scores however saw their scores go down after their face-lift, while average pre-surgery scores stayed more or less constant.
A distinguished professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Brenda Major, recommended that some methodological glitch may have limited the study's ability to pin down the relationship between face-lifts and self-esteem.
However, she agreed that a face-lift may not be an approach people want to take if what they're really trying to work on is core self-esteem issues.
