Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “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 think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
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 looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
