Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag 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 SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, 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 facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed 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 dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
