Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling 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 going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels 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 desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
