‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer 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 express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if 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 suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|