Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent 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 in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
