Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. 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 contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
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” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
