Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties 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 observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective 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 deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum 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 do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
