Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal 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 the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells 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 attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin 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 express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes 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 facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator 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 right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
