Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, 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 among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down 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 affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit 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’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts 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 exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ 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 says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
