Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection 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 – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
