Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, 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 purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, 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 never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
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 local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
