Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates 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 appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
