Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw 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 home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ 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 requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost 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 eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers 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 pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
