Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – 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 six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse 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 video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, 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 doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
