Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – 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 result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional 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 home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing 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 most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states 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 see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
