Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.
How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.
Deep Plane Technique
While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable 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 currently.”
Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|
