‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern 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 outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|