Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
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 prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” 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 “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
