Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to 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 years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates 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. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
