Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “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 adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions 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 local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing 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 solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
