Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous 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 tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive 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’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 a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels 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 different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to 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 using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
