Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider 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 skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates 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 naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure 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 receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – 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 reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons 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 different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
