Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes 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 undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
