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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online 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 Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|