Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
