Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last 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 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 look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery 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 dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
