Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. 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 skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, 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 wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
