Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to 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 hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year 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 individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
