Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern 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 altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-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 wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although 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 cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
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 move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies 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 on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
