Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 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 lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
