Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic 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, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals 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 overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit 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 patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|