Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on 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.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term 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 do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
