Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. 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 stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown 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 gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon 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 adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
