Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, 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 rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
