Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive 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 wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
