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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors 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 lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her 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 eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|