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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on 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 allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, 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 began moving 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 could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|