Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw 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 house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
