I am writing this post to describe female beauty between the ages of 35 and 55.

It reflects the “ideal” I aim to achieve in my practice. If we are going to work together, our values and expectations need to be aligned.

True – every age has its unique beauty.

But the beauty of every age is different.

When you take some of the factors that determine the beauty of an 18-year-old young woman and put them on a 50-year-old woman’s face, you get a strange woman’s face rather than a beautiful woman.

In this article, I will cover the beauty criteria in “women” because the criteria in men in the same age group are completely different.

When you have a closer look at the most beautiful women between the ages of 35 and 55, you can see that they have some common features.

Almost all have thin, angled and expressive faces.

The total volume of the face decreases with age, the face becomes thinner and this thinning adds a unique beauty to middle-aged women.  Global fullness of the face is a beauty criterion specific to the ages of 10-25. It does not suit a middle-aged beauty. Therefore, we do not aim at all to plump the face in beautiful, middle-aged women. One of the biggest injustices that can be done to middle-aged women is to mask the beauty of this age with applications such as excessive filler and fat injection.

Critical volume losses can be intervened while preserving the fine facial features of the middle-aged beauty. For instance, the volume losses due to the constant compression of mimic muscles under the eyes and of the masticatory muscle in the temple can be balanced with fat injections. However, even in critical compression areas, the aim is not to add an extra fullness to the face but to balance the loss of volume during the aging process.

The most suitable surgical intervention for the thin face of the middle-aged beauty is a deep plane facelift. This eliminates the squareness of the lower part of the face, the crowding around the mouth and the deterioration of the neckline during the aging process. The natural result is a thinner and angular face structure. Although the procedure alone does not reduce the face, it “reveals” a thinner and angled facial structure by moving the bulky soft tissue mass to a more ideal anatomical position.

I noted that the face of a middle-aged beauty should be thin, but at this point, it is useful to talk about the potential harms of some interventions aimed at thinning the face. In middle-aged women, the face is already thinning by itself. We are trying to keep the soft tissue balance of a self-thinning face in place. We never ever try to make the face smaller or thinner externally.

This point is super important

because in the middle age group, anything that reduces the volume of the face with external intervention creates a relative relaxation in the skin and SMAS layer, making the face droop faster. Therefore, it is wise to stay away from volume-reducing applications such as masseter Botox, liposuction, ultrasonic fat ablation, radiofrequency fat ablation, fat-melting mesotherapy and bichectomy in the middle age group.

In my practice, such applications can only be applied simultaneously with a facelift. If you can balance the relaxation that occurs as a result of volume deficiency with a facelift in the same session, volume reduction procedures can be performed. Other than that, you have to be very, very careful  because while trying to attain the ideally-thin face of the middle-aged beauty, it is possible to cause too quick an aging in the individual, thereby obliging them to have a facelift.

As I mentioned above, in a middle-aged beauty, the thin structure of the face is meaningful as long as it is simultaneously present with angularity. The main factor ensuring angularity is a balanced muscular/skeletal/dental structure. Therefore, it is not appropriate to reduce skeletal or muscular structures to secure a thin face in middle-aged women. It is of great importance to protect the deep structures that determine angularity such as the masseter muscle, temporal muscle, jawbone, cheekbone and brow bone. In particular, the temporal muscle in the temple area may significantly shrink with a slightly-extended Botox application, possibly causing a serious collapse in this area. Masseter Botox may narrow the jaw angle in people over the age of 40 and disrupt the transition contour between the cheek and the neck. Chin rasping and cheekbone reduction surgeries are interventions that you should definitely stay away from if you don’t want to age 10 years in a few months.

I prefer applications that “emphasize” the skeletal structure to preserve or improve the angular character of the face in middle-aged, beautiful women. Therefore, I use calcium hydroxy apatite (CaHA) fillers such as radiesse and novuma, just above the bone in areas such as the chin, cheekbone, chin angle, temple and nasolabial fold. Both the duration of action and the cost-benefit ratio are higher. However, if there is a serious deficiency in these areas, it is useful to give surgical options priority.  For instance, if the chin bone is retruding, it would be much more useful to perform an early chin advancement (genioplasty) surgery instead of injecting 2-3 ml of fillers there every year. For instance, if the cheekbone is severely underdeveloped, it would be more useful to put a prosthesis there or perform a midface lift.

In principle, areas with skeletal insufficiency age faster. Therefore, it is useful to diagnose skeletal deficiency particularly in the early 30s and to optimize skeletal defects in order for the patient to age well.

A must for the faces of beautiful middle-aged women is an expressive and meaningful facial structure. Perhaps the most important thing that adds expression to the face in this age group is mimic wrinkles and folds. I can’t help but take the opportunity to criticize the Botox craze at this point. Botox should never, ever destroy mimic wrinkles and facial expressions. The purpose of Botox should be to reduce overactive mimics to a normal range. There is no middle-aged beauty without double folds at the corner of her mouth and crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes when she smiles. When I write this, people get the impression that I am against Botox. I’m not against it. I’m just trying to say that it is a “medicine” that should be used for the right indication.

In the past, phenol/croton oil peelings, which can almost completely erase mimic wrinkles, were commonly used. When you erase the wrinkles of the middle-aged woman, you cannot reveal the smooth skin of the 20s. The result is a flat and glossy surface like paper, incompatible with the overall face. This extremely flat surface is incompatible with the surface features of the surrounding structures and thus stands out. Others can sense that something is not normal, even though they can’t understand exactly what it is. Such results are unacceptable from my personal point of view. Therefore, I prefer rather moderate methods such as TCA in surface treatments, which reduce the depth of wrinkles but do not completely eliminate them.

In all age groups, from a newborn baby to an 80-year-old woman, a full eye aperture is a crucial beauty criterion. A full eye aperture means that the eyelash border of the upper eyelid crosses the colored halo of the eye tangentially from the upper border. In the aging process, after the age of 30, this level drops by 1 millimeter every 10 years, and the eyes appear smaller and flatter. This look reduces the energy in the gaze. It creates the perception that the person is bone-tired. It contrasts with the “expressive” face ideal of the middle-aged beauty.  We call this condition “ptosis” or droopy eyelid. Droopy eyelids is a condition independent of excess skin on the eyelid or the brow level. On my blog, you can find a dedicated article on that. A normal eye aperture is very important in terms of the expressive facial structure in my ideal of the middle-aged beauty.

Another key factor is the dental structure. Although this is not a subject that I am directly interested in, a beautiful smile is one of the major determinants of beauty for all ages without exception. There is no other factor as effective as the smile in the “expression” of an individual. The dynamics of smiling is impaired in the vast majority of patients with a distorted dental structure. Patients develop strange smiling dynamics to hide their dental structure. This strikes a big blow to the “expressive” facial structure of the middle-aged beauty. I have patients who want procedures such as lip augmentation and lip lift without optimizing their smiling dynamics yet. In oral aesthetics, dental treatment should always be prioritized.

Finally, I would like to briefly touch on lip and midface fullness. In early youth, full lips and cheeks that fill the under eye area are acceptable. In middle-aged beauties, adjusting the lip and midface fullness optimally is a must. We definitely address severely thin lips or depressed midface area in the treatment plan. If there is a severe loss of volume under the eyes, we perform a midface lift, and if the lip volume is severely reduced, we apply lip augmentation. However, the vast majority of these patients are already individuals with thin lips or a non-voluminous undereye structure, even in their early youth. Our primary goal is to bring lip and midface fullness to a “normal” range.  Therefore, my preference in midface aesthetics is midface lift based on the principle of redistributing the cheek volume on the facial skeleton without adding any external volume.  An above-normal fullness on the lips or midface creates a “vamp” look that makes the face of middle-aged beautiful women coarse, moves attention away from the eyes and distorts the natural curves of the face. I don’t like it, and I don’t do it. See  Nicole Kidman’s new version.

Before starting to beautify the face, I recommend that you get an opinion from a professional about the definition of beautiful and what we should aim for.

Don’t be an Instagram beauty. Be a beauty of your age.

You have to look good from every angle, not only from one angle or in one photo, but also when talking and smiling.

Take good care…

… of yourself and your beauty.

OB