Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases 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 dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied 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 using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing 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 solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
