Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
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 little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable 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 – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo 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 had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
