Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform 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.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for 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 surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. 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 doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing 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 touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
