Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous 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 online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat 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 facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human 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 stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour 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 conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “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 think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, 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 Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
