Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as 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 promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
