Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; 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 appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
