Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London 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 people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. 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 risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
