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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates 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 in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – 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.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, 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. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution 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, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|