Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of 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 wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
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 just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
