Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. 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 dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage 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 naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – 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 arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
