Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent 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.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
