Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states 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 somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, 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 wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, 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. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
