Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-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 keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
