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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty 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 surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. 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 “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from 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 eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|