Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says 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 reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant 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 forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
