Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little 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 known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, 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 replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
