Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed 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 now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons 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 targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, 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 needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator 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 facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
