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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension 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 underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift 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 solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|