Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, 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 based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable 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 laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “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 results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using 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 make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
