Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use 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 produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders 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 other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
