Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, 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 specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “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 top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures 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. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
