Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to 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 years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension 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 deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says 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 somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
