Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first 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 home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look 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 deep plane technique. “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 single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally 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 topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state 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 choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended 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 jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
