Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments 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 top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient 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 pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for 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 booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
