Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell 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 one of a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive 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 is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called 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 brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
