Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s 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 ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving 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 study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “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 where I’m at right now.”
Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
