Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “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 believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ 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. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think 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|
