Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag 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 called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied 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 filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
