Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection 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 laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
