Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients 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 hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided 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,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
