Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full 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 all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
