Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
