Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed 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 had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains 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 whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight 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 found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
