Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients 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 trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused 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 advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined 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 currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
