Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly 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 Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse 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 jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape 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 skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on 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 single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal 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 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift 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, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
