Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon 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 structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled 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 finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
