Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based 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 see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘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 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
