Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
