Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open 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 fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range 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 ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, 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 reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, 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 blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
