Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built 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 superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure 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 conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
