Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first 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 had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, 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 forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” 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 bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as 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 dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People 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 evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding 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 plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
