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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial 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 home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years 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 individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts 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 found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|