Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first 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 had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – 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 suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
