There is now a plastic surgeon in Northern Virginia offering a “FaceTime Facelift,” a medical procedure that, very specifically, aims to improve the way you look when video-chatting using the FaceTime app on the iPhone.
Yes, this is a real thing, and yes, you can get your own FaceTime Facelift right now. If you’re afraid your neck looks flabby or fatty during video-chats, you can just drive on down to see Dr. Robert K. Sigal, a plastic surgeon at The Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Virginia: The doctor has invented a procedure, which he has dubbed the “FaceTime Facelift,” that ensures that your unsightly neck flab never embarrasses you in front of your FaceTime friends again.
As the doctor notes in a press release, hating the way you look while FaceTime-ing is a totally common complaint, and one that can be fixed with a simple nip-and-tuck:
Patients come in with their iPhones and show me how they look on [Apple’s video calling application] FaceTime. The angle at which the phone is held, with the caller looking downward into the camera, really captures any heaviness, fullness and sagging of the face and neck. People say ‘I never knew I looked like that! I need to do something!’ I’ve started calling it the ‘FaceTime Facelift’ effect. And we’ve developed procedures to specifically address it.
Dr. Sigal came up with the iSurgery idea after his wife bought her iPhone 4 in 2011.
“She got an iPhone — I guess around 6 months ago, 8 months ago — and she didnt like the way she looked while she talked on her iPhone,” Dr. Sigal says, in a promotional video. “It tends to draw their chin in a little bit and accentuates any fullness they have in this [chin] area.”
Now, the FaceTime Facelift is essentially a special kind of neck-lift. What makes it special, you ask? Well, let’s talk about how neck-lifts are normally done, and how they’re done with the FaceTime Facelift.
Normally, you see, the surgical incision for a neck-lift goes under the chin, as Dr. Sigal explains in a promotional video. This is a problem for FaceTime users, of course, because if you’re pointing the iPhone up at yourself, the scar from the incision would be totally visible —Everyone knows you got a neck-lift! The FaceTime Facelift, meanwhile, moves the incision point to under the ears, which is totally invisible to your FaceTime partner! Now no one will know how superficial you are — at least, not just by looking at you when you’re talking to them on FaceTime.
Fun side note: that one way to avoid the neck flab issue on FaceTime entirely is to point the iPhone’s camera straight on and then to point your chin down, making the neck invisible. It’s an old Larry King trick, she assured me, and works well for anyone concerned about how they look on their smartphone’s front-facing camera.
