Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least 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 “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about 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.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon 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 patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
