Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone 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 startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t 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 in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
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 effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
