Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels 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 advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
