Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among 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 forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
