Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
