Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, 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, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for 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 choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as 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 facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
