Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, 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 secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients 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 injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
