Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based 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 observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit 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 called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” 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 injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
