Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable 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 describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. 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 desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “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.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
