Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously 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 property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based 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 somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit 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’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure 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’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
