Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
