Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 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 debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed 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 video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice 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 causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it 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 procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started 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 local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think 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, including a three-day|
