Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘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 somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to 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 hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers 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 young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state 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 list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
