If you've ever had a cut stitched, you already know most of what a thread lift does: a fine thread holds tissue exactly where it's wanted while the body gets on with the mending. A thread lift borrows that idea, points it at a jawline that has softened, and then does one more thing that catches almost everybody out.
What the threads in a thread lift actually are
They're sutures. Stitches, in other words: the dissolving kind surgeons have used for a very long time, and that really is the whole of it.
What changes is where they go and what they're asked to hold. A stitch in a cut passes through the two edges and keeps them together until they knit. A thread lift stitch goes under the skin instead, into the soft tissue that has drifted downward over the years, and holds that tissue in a better position. Nothing is opened up, and nothing is taken away.
Now for the letters, because PDO is the name most people arrive with. PDO stands for polydioxanone, which is one of the materials dissolvable surgical stitches are made from, and somewhere along the way it became the phrase people type when they mean a thread lift of any kind: go looking for a thread lift and PDO is usually what comes back at you.
The threads we use at Broadway Retreat are Silhouette Soft®, and they're made from a different material altogether: their main ingredient is poly-L-lactic acid, used in surgical medicine for more than forty years. Silhouette Soft® is approved by the MHRA here in the UK and by the FDA in the United States, which means the regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have looked at it and said yes.
So if PDO was the phrase that brought you here, this is the bit worth carrying away: the threads we'd place for you are the poly-L-lactic acid ones, whatever the search box calls the treatment.
And there's a reason the material gets talked about so much, which is that the thread has two jobs and the second one is to leave. It has to hold your tissue firmly for months, and then break down and go without you ever having to think about it again. That's a fair amount to ask of anything.
How a thread lift lifts, and why one appointment gives you two results
Now, a stitch in a cut only ever does one job, and this is where a thread lift stops behaving like one. Silhouette Soft® has a double action, and the second half of it arrives long after you've stopped thinking about the appointment.
The first action happens while you're lying there. Fine anchoring sutures are placed under the skin and used to lift the sagging tissue immediately, so your practitioner reshapes the contour of your face there and then. The change is done by the time you stand up. You don't go home and wait for it.
The second action is the slow one, and your own body does all of it. Over the months that follow, the threads stimulate your collagen, which is the protein that keeps skin firm and the one you steadily make less of as the years go by. New collagen builds along the line the threads are holding. The sutures then dissolve naturally, and the collagen they leave behind is what maintains the lift.
Here's the picture that makes that order click, and pleasingly it comes from the world stitches belong to anyway. Before a tailor sews a proper seam, they run a loose row of tacking stitches through the fabric first, and that tacking really is holding the shape: it keeps every piece exactly where they want it for the whole time the real seam is going in. Once the seam is there, the fabric holds itself, and the tacking has nothing left to hold. The one difference is what happens after that. A tailor picks their tacking out with a pin. Yours never gets picked out at all, because it dissolves where it lies.
A thread lift runs in exactly that order. The threads hold the position, your collagen becomes the seam, and by the time the threads have gone the holding has quietly changed hands.
Which areas of the face a thread lift can lift
Threads suit the places where tissue travels downward, and there are four of those we treat.
Most people look at the lower jaw and jawline first, because a soft jaw tends to be the first change anyone notices in their own face. Lifting the tissue back up gives the eye a border to find again.
The cheeks and cheekbones come next, and they're worth more attention than they get. A cheek that sits lower than it used to takes the whole middle of the face down with it, so lifting there tends to change more than the cheek itself.
The eyebrows are the quiet one. Brows sink by very little as the years pass, and very little is all it takes to make a face look tired when it isn't, which is why lifting them reads as looking rested rather than as having had anything done.
And then there's the neck, which keeps its own timetable entirely and rarely troubles itself to match the face above it. Threads work there too, which is worth knowing if the neck was the part you'd assumed nothing could be done about.
If you've been searching for a thread lift near you and wondering whether the thing bothering you is even on the list, well, that's the list. Which of those four your face is actually asking for is the sort of thing we work out with you in front of us.
What actually happens at a thread lift appointment
Your consultation comes first, always, and its job is to map which areas will benefit: jawline, cheeks, brows or neck. That's a decision about your face rather than a default, and it's the part that decides whether you like the result.
Then the treatment itself, which is a calmer thing to sit through than the word sutures makes it sound. The fine sutures are placed under the skin with a needle, your practitioner reshapes the contours immediately, and slight pressure is applied to set the lift where you've both agreed it should sit.
The repositioning is visible straight away, and then the slow half begins: over the following months the threads stimulate your own collagen to maintain the lift as they dissolve. What to expect afterwards, and how to look after the area while all that is happening, is something we talk through with you properly rather than leaving you to read about it.
What a thread lift honestly won't do
Here's the part we'd rather say plainly now than let you find out later, because the edges of a treatment matter every bit as much as the middle.
A thread lift moves things. It never removes them. Everything that goes up is tissue you already have, carried back to where it used to sit, and moving it is the whole job. Which means there comes a point where threads stop being the answer, and it arrives when the skin itself has become the problem, because lifting extra skin still leaves you with extra skin. That's a surgical conversation, and we've written it up properly in thread lift or facelift. Because our surgical suite is here in the same clinic, the advice you get isn't shaped by what we can't do.
It's also worth being clear about volume, because lifting and filling get tangled together constantly. When a cheek slides down the face, the fullness hasn't gone anywhere; it has moved, and putting it back where it belongs reads as fullness returning. What threads can't do is replace volume that has genuinely left from underneath, and that's the job of dermal fillers instead. A hollow that sits there while your face is completely still is a volume question. A shape that has dropped is a lifting one.
Who tends to get on well with a thread lift
The pattern is fairly consistent, and you may well recognise yourself in it.
People fighting sagging skin or lost volume who don't feel ready for surgery, which is far and away the most common description we hear. Nothing about the face needs altering; it just wants putting back where it was.
People who want to see the change on the day. Plenty of good treatments ask you to wait weeks for a result, and there are times in life when waiting simply isn't what you're after.
And people who like the idea that the lasting part is made by their own body. If that's the bit you find appealing, you'd probably enjoy reading about what microneedling does to your skin too, because it comes at the same collagen from a completely different direction.
Come and find out what threads would lift on your face
The useful next step here isn't more reading; it's having somebody look at your face and tell you what's genuinely going on with it. Arrange your consultation and we'll settle it properly: whether what you're seeing is tissue that has moved, volume that has gone, or skin that has travelled further than threads can hold. You'll get the honest answer for your face, including when the honest answer turns out to be a different treatment altogether.
Every treatment at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided. The thread lift treatment page has the fuller picture if you'd like to read that first.
A stitch has always had the same job: hold on until the body can take over. These ones just do it somewhere nobody will ever see.