Have you already read the first part? If not, you can follow this link here.
The changes of the contour
Volume and anatomy
Now we come to the second part of the description of the ageing process, the change of the anatomy. Here as well, many factors play a role, for example gravity can cause fat deposits to sink; what is already unpleasant in parts of the body often becomes a real problem for the face. This natural gravity-induced process is further supported by wear and tear. The holding ligaments are there to hold the different facial proportions in place. With increasing age, they lose more and more of this ability, quite simply put, they wear out and thus support the sagging. The fat then collects in various places on the lower part of the face where it does not really belong, in the nasolabial folds (these are the bulges to the right and left of the nose, in the drooping cheeks and also in the much-discussed chin area, the double chin and chin line. The chin line, which originally gives the face a clear outline, becomes blurred due to the accumulated fat. The face becomes much wider at the bottom, where it was originally more pointed. But further up, where wider and more voluminous cheeks were visible in youth, the volume is now missing. We perceive this change in proportions as age. You can perceive this change on many faces, especially of course on faces that originally had almost optimal aesthetic facial proportions like the faces of our film stars. Google pictures of Claudia Cardinale, Catherine Deneuve, Gary Grant, Sylvester Stallone or Jane Fonda. But there are also stars who struggle less with these anatomical changes, such as Johnny Depp or Audrey Hepburn. For these stars, age is then more visible through skin changes than through changes in facial proportions. The change in facial proportions can easily be visualised with a visual aid: Imagine an egg standing on its tip. This egg symbolizes the state of a young face. Now turn the egg around and you will see the proportions of the older face.
Another anatomical region related to the sinking of a fat depot is located below the eyes. The small fat deposits under the eyes, called tear sacs, also change the proportions of the face, but less in width and more in depth.
Even our skeleton ages, for example, we lose size with increasing age due to bone loss. In the face, the jaw region is particularly affected by this. The jaw area sinks in.
Other signs of ageing
Aging is not just limited to skin status and proportion. There are other unmistakable signs: The teeth and hair fall out. While both sexes react to the status of teeth in roughly the same way, with dental prostheses of whatever kind, the reactions to hair loss can be classified as gender-specific. For men, baldness is often (but less and less) an aesthetic problem; for women, even a thinning of the scalp with the accompanying visibility of the scalp is often a catastrophe.
Championing for well-ageing
Should every sign of age be prevented? Is age in itself bad? What about maturity? What about the signs of a lived life? Since when is wisdom no longer part of old age? In the first part of this article we described the signs of age very drastically and would now like to set a counterpoint to this. Sometimes the faces of old people are simply beautiful, even sublime, and they radiate wisdom and vitality. It cannot be the task of aesthetic medicine to simply erase all signs of old age. Women over 70 with the smooth and wrinkle-free skin of a 20-year-old look unnatural and thus become caricatures of themselves through overcorrection. Restoring the attributes of youthfulness cannot mean shaping an old and mature person into an adolescent. Such excesses have nothing to do with aesthetic medicine and violate all aesthetic principles.
In the following article we will take a closer look at different forms of aesthetic treatments, when they are “necessary” and how to deal with them.