Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable 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 causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique 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 loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered 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 regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
