Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – 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 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
