Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, 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 forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas 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 finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
