Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, 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 growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
