Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour 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 more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” 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 point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, 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 recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|