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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new 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 how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments 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.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. 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 outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown 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 also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|