Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort 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 says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
