Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up 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 cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed 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.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts 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 needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
