Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform 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, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive 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’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers 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 desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
