Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before 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 facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger 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, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting 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 contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties 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 effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long 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. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift 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 eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
