Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates 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 appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ 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 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic 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 tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
