Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open 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 appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic 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 observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, 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 arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
