Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, 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 among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version 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.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
