Has anyone combined a Jeju trip with a facelift?
I'm planning a longer stay in Korea for a facelift, and Jeju specifically came onto my radar because of a friend of mine. She had an SMAS facelift at VIP plastic surgery there, and the whole experience she described kind of stuck with me. The recovery took some time but during that period she ended up genuinely bonding with patients from all over the world, and those friendships turned out to be real, one of them actually visited her back in the States afterward. Seeing that her results, and from what she could tell everyone else's from that recovery group, turned out well made me realize how much you can learn just from being around people going through the same thing at the same time.
So now I'm looking at VIP for myself but I'm considering going a step further than she did: deep plane instead of SMAS. Her results looked great, but I want to know whether deep plane would make a meaningful difference for me specifically, particularly for midface repositioning and the jawline neck transition. I'm not trying to second guess her choice, I'm just trying to figure out if my goals are different enough that the more involved technique is worth it, and whether the results at 6-12 months still look natural rather than pulled.
From what i heard vip structures the whole stay as one contained experience: surgery, recovery, meals, and aftercare inside one building. You arrive in Jeju a couple days early for labs (blood, urine, EKG, chest xray), meet the surgeon to finalize the plan, then surgery in the morning and straight upstairs to recover. After that it's daily morning dressings with the doctor, LED for swelling, oxygen therapy and meals covered in building during the hardest first days. Around the one week mark they offer a short Jeju tour with a driver once you're stable enough to get outside. My friend talked about this setup being genuinely helpful during recovery, not just a nice to have.
A few things I'd love to hear from people who've actually been through this. If you had deep plane at VIP specifically, how did your midface and neck look by the 3-6 month window compared to what you expected going in? Did the results continue settling naturally past that point? And more broadly, did doing this in Jeju versus Seoul actually affect your recovery in any meaningful way, or was the location mainly just a lifestyle difference? I'm also curious whether the one building setup changed how your day to day recovery felt, since my friend said it mattered more than she expected. If you went SMAS and later wished you'd gone deeper, or chose deep plane and felt it was more than you needed, that comparison would be really useful to hear.