Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum 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 reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
