Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
