Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
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” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
