Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”
You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”
If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as 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 face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
