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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen 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 arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t 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: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery 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 Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|