Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered 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 property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “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 term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, 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, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
