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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds 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 bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates 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 evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of 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 wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, 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 companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|