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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw 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 video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” 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 clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|