Six months post facelift, I've lost a stone and my face now looks emptier rather than younger. Has the lift dropped or is it the weight?

Six months out from my SMAS lift and I need to say something out loud that I've been avoiding saying to anyone who knows me.

Background: I lost about a stone between March and June. Some of it deliberate, some of it because I took up walking properly and stopped drinking wine on weeknights. All good things. And my jaw and my neck are still exactly where he put them, which I want to say clearly because I don't want this to read as a horror story.

But my face has gone HOLLOW. My cheeks are flatter than they were at three months, there's a shadow at my temples that I'm fairly sure wasn't there, and in certain lighting I look less like a woman who's had a facelift and more like a woman who's been unwell. My husband, who is not observant, asked if I was eating.

So which is it: has the lift started to drop at six months, which would be a disaster and much too soon, or has losing a stone taken the padding out of my face? Because in the mirror at eleven at night these look like exactly the same thing and I cannot tell them apart.

They look the same and they are not the same, and knowing that is genuinely most of the way to feeling better about it.

A lift moves things that have drifted downwards back up. If a lift drops, the drift comes back: the jowl reappears at the jawline, the neck softens, the shape returns to where it was. That is a bottom-of-the-face story and it does not happen at six months in the way you're imagining.

What you're describing is top of the face and it's about how much is in it, not where it sits. Flat cheeks, shadowed temples, a face that reads as thin rather than as old. That's volume. Different problem, different cause, and losing a stone in three months will do it to almost anyone past fifty.

The tell is your jaw. You've said it's still where he put it. That's your answer.

Reading this two days before my own surgery with my stomach somewhere around my knees, but honestly, thank you for posting it. I'd have had no idea this was even a category of thing that could happen and I'd have panicked twice as hard.

Cheryl, I could have written your post almost word for word, including the husband asking whether I was eating, so let me give you the version I wish someone had given me.

I lost roughly a stone in the year after my lift and my face did precisely what yours has done. Sharper jaw, which I had wanted. Emptier cheeks and slightly shadowed temples, which I had not. And I spent an entire autumn quietly convinced my result was failing, checking my jawline in shop windows, working out whether I could bear to ring the clinic and say I thought it had dropped after nine months.

When I finally raised it, the thing that reframed it for me was being told that this was not the operation failing, it was a different complaint arriving on top of a successful one. A facelift corrects laxity and downward drift. It does not restore volume that has gone, and it never claimed to, which is why the two get so tangled: the operation you had fixed one of them and is silent on the other. Rosemary's tell is the right one and I used the same one. If the jawline and neck are holding, the lift is holding. I've set the whole of it out in facelift and weight loss.

What I'd say about the fixing, carefully, because I am a patient and not a surgeon. Where the complaint is genuinely volume, the operation aimed at it is fat transfer rather than anything to do with the lift, and it's often done alongside a lift rather than instead of one, which is covered in facelift and fat transfer. Whether that's what your face needs is a question for the man who operated on it, at a proper follow-up where he can look at you in daylight rather than at eleven at night. Do go and ask him. In my experience surgeons are relieved rather than irritated when you turn up with a specific question instead of a vague unhappiness.

And the unglamorous last thing: six months is not the finish line anyway. Things were still settling on my face at nine and ten months.

Agreeing with all of the above and adding the bit that I think is underrated, which is that a thinner face is not automatically a younger one and we have all been trained to believe it is.

I went the other way. I put on half a stone in my second year after the deep plane, entirely by accident, and my face looked BETTER. Softer, less drawn, and the jawline was still perfectly good because the lift was doing that job and didn't need help. It genuinely surprised me because I'd spent thirty years assuming thinner equals better in every context.

So before you go hunting for a fix, Cheryl, I'd sit with it for a month or two and see whether it's the hollowness you object to or the shock of change. They resolve differently.

Went and asked, as instructed. He looked at me in proper daylight, pressed about a bit, and said the lift was holding exactly as it should and that what I was seeing was volume loss from the weight, mostly midface and temple. Same conclusion as this thread reached about five weeks earlier, at no cost, which is a slightly humbling thing to notice.

Where I've landed: not doing anything about it yet. He said there was no urgency and that he'd rather see me at a year before we talk about whether anything is worth adding. Annelise, your point landed with me more than I expected, because I've been off the wine again this month and my first thought was "careful". Which is a strange sentence to type at 63 and possibly a healthier one than the alternative.