Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional 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 home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating 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 excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says 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.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels 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 underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, 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 – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida 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 selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
