Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed 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 open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. 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 undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags 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
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether injectable substances 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 move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas 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 needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
