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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

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 “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|