Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video 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 cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “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 supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments 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
Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit 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 anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels 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 youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift 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 eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
