Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey 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 naturally the methods are following,” comments 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.
Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least 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 entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate 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 slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.
For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt 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|
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