‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin 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 deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|