Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals 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 injectable gels 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 development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
