Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, 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 portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
