Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor 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 personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended 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 “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
