Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional 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 home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, 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 keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for 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 somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin 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 additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
