Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video 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 among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties 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 see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged 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 decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
