Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – 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 result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy 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.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention 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. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables 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 using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas 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 needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
