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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up 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 minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies 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 contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, 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 other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – 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 mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|