Elle Magazine, 'Beauty, Body, Health,' April 2007

It practically takes a medical degree to choose between mini-lifts, S-lifts, and the L.I.F.T. (limited incision face-lift technique). “These are nebulous terms that don’t tell you a lot,” says Park Avenue plastic surgeon David Hidalgo, MD, a renowned plastic surgeon “naturalist” who was once chief of plastic surgery at New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Hidalgo simplifies things considerably, explaining that all face-lifts can be classified two ways:  by length of incision and by how they manipulate the tissues underneath the skin. “Traditional face-lifts have a full pattern scar that goes in front of the ear and into the hairline,” he says. The procedures mentioned above, on the other hand, are variations on the short-scar technique, in which the incision stops before going into the hairline; it’s popularity grew in the 1990’s, after minimizing downtime became a priority and surgeons began to realize they were over operating, removing too much valuable facial fat and pulling too tight. Hidalgo says a short-scar procedure may sound less invasive, but it can be 90 percent as major as the traditional method.