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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how 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 jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|