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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|