Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends 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 appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting 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 youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
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” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area 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 anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
