Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin 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 expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
