Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted 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 open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “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 surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
