Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|
