Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, 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 initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
