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Written By: Jeffrey Atlas, PA-C, Health Content Writer
Medically Reviewed By: Dr. Gopal Grandhige, MD, FACS, Board-Certified Surgeon
Last Reviewed: August 1, 2026
Most of them do it the same way you can, with a mix of surgery and in-office treatments. There’s no special A-list trick. The famous faces with sharp jawlines into their 60s almost always had a facelift or neck lift at some point. The ones who look rested but not “done” usually leaned on skin tightening, threads, or fillers to hold off the sag for a few years first. Camera angles and lighting handle whatever’s left.
Celebrities get rid of jowls with options that scale to how much skin has dropped. Mild sagging responds to radiofrequency skin tightening, thread lifts, or fillers. Moderate to severe jowls need a surgical facelift or neck lift for a lasting result. The right pick comes down to age, skin quality, and how loose the tissue has become.
I’ll say the part most beauty articles skip. If your jowls already hang over your jawline, no cream, gua sha tool, or face-taping trick is going to reverse that. I’ve sat across from plenty of patients who spent a year and a small fortune on gadgets before booking a consult. Save yourself the detour.
Jowls are the loose, sagging skin that forms along and just below the jawline as the face ages. They blur the clean line between your face and neck, which reads as heavier and older even when the rest of you looks fine.
The cause isn’t one thing. It’s a stack of them. Your skin loses collagen and elastin, the two proteins that keep it firm and springy. Fat pads in your cheeks slide down and pool along the jaw. The jawbone itself shrinks a little with age, so there’s less scaffolding underneath. The ligaments that hold everything in place stretch and loosen. Then gravity pulls on all of it, year after year.
Some of this is genetic. If your parents got jowls early, you probably will too. But the accelerators are in your control. Sun exposure, smoking, and big weight swings all speed up the breakdown, and smoking is the worst offender because it starves the skin of blood flow.
One thing most people miss. Jowls often show up in your late 30s and 40s, well before anyone expects them. That’s exactly why the people who age well started early.
They match the treatment to the problem, and they start before it’s obvious. That’s the whole trick. Someone who looks great at 55 didn’t wait until everything collapsed and then book one dramatic surgery. They’ve been maintaining for a decade.
Formation offers both surgical and non-surgical options for exactly this reason, because “jowls” covers everything from a slight softening to full-on drooping, and those two ends don’t get the same answer.
The rough map is simple. Early, mild jowling calls for energy treatments, threads, or fillers. Moderate sagging with decent skin quality suits a minimally invasive option like radiofrequency tightening or targeted fat removal. Real, heavy jowls need surgery. Anyone selling you a non-surgical “facelift” for severe sagging is selling you a touch-up you’ll be let down by.
For moderate to severe jowls, surgery is the only thing that delivers a lasting change. Everything else buys time. A facelift repositions the deeper tissue and removes excess skin, so the jawline gets rebuilt rather than just tightened at the surface.
The demand backs this up. ASPS counted 79,058 facelifts in the most recent year of data, up about 1 percent, with neck lifts climbing 2 percent. Facial surgery isn’t fading. It’s holding steady while more people fold it in earlier, often alongside the most common procedures like eyelid surgery and fat grafting.
At Formation, surgical facelifts and neck lifts are handled by our board-certified plastic surgeon, Dr. Ahmad Saad. Dr. Gopal Grandhige leads the practice and its non-surgical side, and the two work from the same idea, which is that the best result is the one nobody can name.
Yes, surgery asks for two to three weeks of real recovery, and there’s swelling and bruising in the first week. But results run 10 to 15 years with modern technique. Compare that to fillers you’re refreshing every 6 to 12 months, and the long game changes shape fast.
Both work. The deep plane technique tends to edge out the older SMAS approach on patient satisfaction. A 2025 systematic review of nearly 2,900 patients put deep plane satisfaction at 94.4 percent against 87.8 percent for SMAS.
The trade-off is real, though. That same research shows deep plane carries a higher overall complication rate, roughly 17 percent versus 10 percent. A review of 47 studies covering more than 10,000 patients found the serious problems, like hematoma, stayed low for both, around 3 percent and 2 percent. In plain terms, the technique on the brochure matters less than the surgeon holding the instrument.
Jowls and neck sagging almost always travel together. A facelift on its own can leave the neck looking untreated, which is why the two get combined so often. A neck lift tightens the muscle band under the chin and removes loose skin. That sharpens the whole lower face at once. Most celebrity “jawline” transformations are actually a face and neck combination, not one procedure doing all the work.
Not every jowl is a skin problem. Sometimes it’s fat sitting under the chin and along the jaw, which blurs the line and mimics sagging. For that, targeted neck liposuction removes the fat through tiny hidden incisions and sharpens the profile in one visit.
This works best on younger patients whose skin still snaps back. If the skin’s already loose, pulling out the fat underneath can make things sag more, not less. That’s the classic mistake, treating a laxity problem like a fat problem. An honest provider will tell you which one you actually have before anyone touches a cannula.
Yes, for mild to moderate jowls, and that’s where most of the celebrity “no surgery” claims actually live. These treatments won’t match a facelift, but they’ll hold off the need for one and keep things subtle.
Energy is the workhorse of the non-surgical world. Radiofrequency skin tightening heats the deeper layers of skin to trigger fresh collagen, which firms the jawline over three to six months. High-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU, does something similar by reaching even deeper. Neither leaves a scar, and most people are back to normal within a day or two. The catch is that results build slowly and stay modest, so manage your expectations going in.
Threads are the other main option. A thread lift uses dissolvable sutures with tiny barbs to lift sagging tissue and spark collagen at the same time. The lift is immediate, which people love. It fades over a year or two, which is fine if you treat it as maintenance and not a cure. In my view, threads and energy treatments are excellent in your 30s and 40s. Past a certain point of sagging, they turn into a pricey way to delay the thing you actually need.
Fillers don’t lift jowls. They camouflage them. Placed along the jaw and chin, dermal fillers add structure that makes the sag less obvious, and that’s a fair move for early jowling. At Formation, injectables are done by Jeff Atlas, PA-C, who came up through orthopaedics and knows facial anatomy cold.
But there’s a ceiling, and plenty of famous faces blew right past it. Overfill the lower face chasing a lift, and you get the puffy “pillow face” look that reads as fake from across a room. The whole industry swung hard toward that in the 2010s, and the current trend is a firm move back toward less. Filler restores volume. It doesn’t remove loose skin. Ask it to do the second job and you’ll be unhappy.
Weight-loss drugs are quietly reshaping the jowl conversation. Rapid weight loss strips fat from the face, and skin that lost its spring years ago has nothing to shrink onto. So you drop the weight and suddenly look years older, with new jowls that weren’t there before.
The scale of it is big. Around 837,000 patients on GLP-1 medications sought aesthetic care under board-certified plastic surgeons in a single year, and facial procedures like facelifts and neck lifts saw a clear bump because of it. If you’re on one of these drugs and your lower face is heading south, you’re not imagining it. Plan the skin side of the journey, not just the number on the scale.
The gap between a great outcome and an obvious one is almost never the machine. It’s who’s running it. I’ll be blunt about the biggest money-waster in this whole field. It’s chasing a bargain from an unqualified injector or a discount med spa, then paying a real surgeon to fix it.
Check board certification, not just a fancy title. Ask to see before-and-after photos of patients with your exact concern, not a highlight reel of the best cases. Ask how often the surgeon performs revisions. And be honest with yourself about how much sagging you’re working with, because matching a small treatment to a big problem is how people end up disappointed and out of pocket. A good provider will sometimes talk you out of the thing you came in asking for. That’s a green flag, not a lost sale.
So how do celebrities get rid of jowls? They start before it shows, they match the treatment to the actual amount of sagging, and they choose their provider on skill instead of price. None of that is out of reach for a regular person.
Whether that means threads at 38, radiofrequency at 45, or a facelift at 58, the plan should fit your face and your timeline, not a trend. That’s how celebrities get rid of jowls without it ever looking like they tried. Book a real consultation, get an honest read on where your skin is today, and build from there.
They match the treatment to their level of sagging and start early. Mild jowling gets threads, fillers, or radiofrequency, while heavier sagging gets a facelift or neck lift. The natural look comes from restraint and a skilled provider, not the specific device.
Jowls often appear in the late 30s and 40s, earlier than most people expect. Genetics, sun exposure, and weight changes decide how fast they show up. Starting maintenance early is why many public figures never seem to age all at once.
Yes, for mild to moderate jowls. Radiofrequency tightening, HIFU, and thread lifts firm and lift the lower face with little to no downtime, though results last months to a couple of years rather than a decade. Severe sagging still needs surgery.
A modern facelift can hold for 10 to 15 years, while fillers usually need a refresh every 6 to 12 months. That gap is why surgery, despite the bigger upfront commitment, is often the better long-term value for real sagging.
Fillers camouflage jowls by adding structure along the jaw and chin, but they don't remove loose skin. They're a solid choice for early jowling. Overusing them to fake a lift is what creates the puffy "pillow face" look.
Rapid weight loss from GLP-1 drugs strips fat from the face, and aging skin can't shrink back to fit. Around 837,000 patients on these medications sought aesthetic care under ASPS surgeons in one year, with facelifts and neck lifts rising as a result.
Most pair a facelift with a neck lift, since jowls and neck sagging show up together. Combining the two sharpens the jawline and the neck in one recovery. A deep plane facelift, one common technique, posts patient satisfaction near 94 percent in recent research.
Everyoneโs anatomy and aesthetic goals are uniqueโwhich is why a personalized assessment is key.
Ready to see if Renuvion is the right fit for your transformation?
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Tampa, we have a secretโฆ and ELLE Magazine just confirmed it. ๐โจ
Say hello to Picofy by InModeโofficially named the Best Glass Skin Laser by ELLE! And the best part? We are the ONLY clinic in Tampa that has it.
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Here is an incredible 3-month update for our patient following a circumferential body lift with liposculpting.
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Edited ยท 2d
1 Month Post-Op Transformation! ๐ฅ
Fixing previous surgical outcomes requires precision, expertise, and a tailored approach.
Hereโs how Dr. Grandhige transformed this patientโs core and chest:
The Challenge:
Previous tummy tuck left uneven abdominal fat distribution
High scar placement creating a visible โshelfโ effect
The Solution:
HD Liposculpture to refine and sculpt a athletic, masculine core and chest
Scar Revision to eliminate the shelf-like appearance and create a smoother profile
Keep in mind, at just 1 month post-op, swelling is still settling and we are nowhere near final results! Canโt wait to see this shape mature over the next few months. ๐ฅ
๐ฌ Questions about revision procedures? Drop them in the comments or send us a DM!
Trust the process. ๐ค
This beautiful tummy tuck transformation is only 1 month post-op!
What makes this journey even more special is where it began. Two years ago, this patient came to us wanting change but wasnโt quite ready for the operating table. Instead of rushing, we partnered with her for the long haul. Through the strategic use of GLP-1 therapy, dedicated nutrition guidance, and mindset coaching, she completely transformed her health to get to where she is today.
While she is already looking incredible, itโs important to remember that residual swelling and inflammation are completely normal at this stage. Healing takes time, but the foundation for an amazing result is officially set!
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Face, neck, and chestโbecause your glow shouldnโt stop at your jawline. ๐๐
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We previously posted this beautiful patientโs immediate before and after following her PDO Lifting Thread treatment.
Take a look at her fantastic results now that the 10 threads we placed are settled.
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