Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, 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, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts
According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – 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 entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined 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 injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
