Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for 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 comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon 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 procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
