Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective 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 becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon 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 the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe 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 half-day surgery, including a three-day|
