Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “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 head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London 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.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” 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 injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
