Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving 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 might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|
