Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up 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, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt 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 young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
