Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when 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 could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
