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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform 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 plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag 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 known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as 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 everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers 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 young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although 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, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|