Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, 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 typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors 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 deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least 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 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 injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – 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 could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
