Patients in their 20s and 30s are walking into consultation rooms once reserved for clients twice their age. Fifty-seven percent of facial plastic surgeons reported an increase in patients under 30 requesting cosmetic procedures or injectables in the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’s 2025 annual trends survey, and that same share predicted the average facelift patient would keep getting younger. An estimated 1.6 million facial procedures were performed nationwide that year, a 19 percent increase, with noninvasive treatments accounting for about 80 percent of the total.
New York facial plastic surgeon Dr. Andrew Jacono has watched that shift play out inside his own Park Avenue practice. “The average age for facelifts in New York and around the world is declining rapidly,” Dr. Andrew Jacono says. He notes that the average age for a mini-facelift among his patients now sits at 45.
A Younger Patient Base Emerges
Habits that didn’t exist a decade ago are feeding the shift. Video calls are part of it. People now stare at their own jawlines and under-eye circles for hours each week, according to University Hospitals, and many don’t love what the webcam shows them. GLP-1-driven weight loss has added a second push, leaving some younger patients managing skin laxity earlier than expected. The old secrecy around cosmetic work is gone, too. It has been replaced by recovery diaries and before-and-after posts, filling the space discretion used to occupy.
Dr. Andrew Jacono ties the pattern to biology as much as culture. Patients in their 40s heal differently than patients in their 60s, he says, and that gap changes how long a result lasts. “A facelift in the forties will last twice as long as one performed on a patient in her sixties,” Dr. Andrew Jacono says. Younger tissue, he adds, is “more robust and resilient, allowing the facelift to maintain its effects for many years.”
Why Technique Matters More at a Younger Age
Dr. Andrew Jacono developed the extended deep-plane facelift, a technique that repositions the skin, muscle and fat of the face as a single unit rather than pulling skin taut over unchanged deeper structures. An August 2026 Financial Times guide to facelift options named his New York Center for Facial Plastic & Laser Surgery among a small handful of practices worldwide performing the technique. He performs approximately 250 deep-plane facelifts annually. Results can last 12 to 15 years, though key factors that affect the longevity of the extended deep-plane facelift include technique, lifestyle, skin quality and care.
For a patient in her 40s, the difference matters more than it would for one in her 60s. A longer-lasting result means fewer procedures are needed over a lifetime, not one late correction. Dr. Andrew Jacono has served for most of his career as a Fellowship Director for the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, training the next generation of specialists in advanced techniques. It’s a vantage point most surgeons don’t have. It puts him close to how the field’s younger caseload is reshaping surgical planning well beyond his own operating room.
Matching the Procedure to the Patient
Not every younger patient belongs on an operating table, Dr. Andrew Jacono says. “Since there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to facial rejuvenation and surgery may not be right for everyone, I recommend that all facial plastic surgeons incorporate nonsurgical techniques into their practice to best serve the individual needs of the modern patient,” he says.
That distinction, between patients who need structural correction and those who need maintenance, separates a facelift candidate from an injectables patient more than age does. A 28-year-old requesting a facelift and a 55-year-old asking for filler are, in Dr. Andrew Jacono’s framing, often describing the same goal in different vocabularies. Both want to look rested rather than remade. The anatomy in front of him decides the technique. The calendar doesn’t.
