Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell 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 little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “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 plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
