Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based 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 bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – 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 reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
