Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “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 deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
