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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy 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 look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

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

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – 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 “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|