Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, 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 dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas 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 found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
