Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – 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.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states 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 waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
