Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped 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 ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”
Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments 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 surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”
You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis 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 underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting 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 terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
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 finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|
