Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-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, temporary – appearance 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 saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
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 local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
