Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive 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 becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – 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 do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders 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 started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution 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, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
