Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw 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 needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says 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.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted 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 advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
