Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped 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 twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London 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 observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it 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 terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if 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 Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
