Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – 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 six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin 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 result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, 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. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas 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 exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
