Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
