Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, 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, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; 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 conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” 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.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block 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 youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
