Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, 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 one of a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting 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 manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state 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 choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
