Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, 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’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says 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.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, 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 thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, 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 injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
