Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
