Let's turn back time for your aging face

Even if you have great genes and look much younger than you are, age-related changes in your facial appearance are unavoidable.

Age affects every nook and cranny of the body. Along with the wisdom, experience, and accomplishments that come with getting older, there are changes that occur in our outward appearance. Changes in our faces are most at the forefront.

How the face ages

• Foreheads expand as hairlines retreat
• Ears often get a bit longer because the cartilage in them grows
• Tips of noses may droop because connective tissue supporting nasal cartilage weakens.
• Uneven distribution of fat on the face, which was evenly distributed back then.
• Wrinkles all over the place.

What can we do about the aging face?

Those changes reflect our joys and challenges in life. One approach should be to simply celebrate our age and appearance for what they are.

Unfortunately, not everyone is comfortable with that, and some might like to postpone embracing those changes. The age-defying facelift, which surgically removes excess tissue and lifts sagging skin in the lower part of the face, is one way to try to stem the tides of time. Facelifts have improved, so the results tend to look more natural. But the surgery is expensive, and other procedures may be needed to achieve the desired results. The facelift procedure is just one of the more popular cosmetic procedures; there are plenty of alternatives for altering the aging face.

Although most of these rejuvenating procedures are nonsurgical, they're not inexpensive — especially when you factor in the need for repeat treatments. Even there's little evidence of the benefit of facial workouts.

Here is just a sample of some of the things that you can do — or get done — to give your face a more youthful appearance:

• Protecting your face from the sun is the single best way of keeping it youthful.
• Moisturizers soothe dry skin and may temporarily make wrinkles less noticeable.
• Botulinum injections are used to treat the expression lines of the forehead and between the brows.
• Dermal fillers are used to treat lines created by lost collagen and fat.
• Lasers can be used to home in on certain pigments: brown, if the goal is to get rid of freckles and liver spots, and red if the target is broken capillaries.