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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor 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’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. 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 individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments 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. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – 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 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable 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 right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|