Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate 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 conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin 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 deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts 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 finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called 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 cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|
