Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “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 advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry 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 not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move 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 somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables 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, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state 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 selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
