Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted 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 swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking 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 aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” 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 clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
