Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because 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 come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw 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 video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches 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, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
