Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – 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, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor 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 explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based 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 people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means 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 numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
