Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, 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 outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London 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 observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, 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.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
