Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least 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 twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator 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 finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|