Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone 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.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “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, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift 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 Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
