Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built 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 called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block 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 anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo 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 didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations 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 advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. 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 lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
