Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little 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 known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research 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 call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift 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 day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
