Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, 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 ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients 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 age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed 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 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 clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding 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 arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
