Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone 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 cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
