Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, 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’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states 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 observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear 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 believe I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal 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, plus a three-day|
