Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, 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 tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing 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 keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”
A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS 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 risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.
“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached 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 harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|
