Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone 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, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe 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 migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed 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 doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|
