Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based 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 individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant 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 did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – 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 suggested 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 suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding 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 arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal 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 half-day surgery, including a three-day|
