Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “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 plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat 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 ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – 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 face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove 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, plus a three-day|
