Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic 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 opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
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 little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets 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 released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
