Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports 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 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
