Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour 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 conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when 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 might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution 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, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
