Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied 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 harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as 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 could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
