Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up 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 video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” 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 aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe 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. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, 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 upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – 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 cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
