Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures 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,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon 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 entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing 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 entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when 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 facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, 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.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek 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 surgery, plus a three-day|
