Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, 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 facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off 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 clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
