Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “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
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before 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 treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on 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 more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels 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 young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically 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. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – 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 arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
