‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as 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 endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined 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 currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|