Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals 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 bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive 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’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties 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 years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – 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 face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
