‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to 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 Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk 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 excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

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

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London 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 secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|