Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon 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.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, 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 Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
