Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open 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 hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do 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 didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing 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 – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
