Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says 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. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “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.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
