Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques 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 style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting 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 no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. 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 “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of 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 cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
