Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
