Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient 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 younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
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 attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested 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 list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, 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 facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|