Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist 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 ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
